Last update: Feb. 2, 2004
One of the main tasks of a visual system is computing the shape of objects. A number of cues, notably stereoscopic disparity, texture gradient, motion parallax, contours and shading, have been shown to carry valuable information on surface shape, and have been studied extensively. Unfortunately, many objects of interest and most man-made surfaces, such as a silver plate, a metal spoon or a clean automobile, are smooth and shiny, violating the hypotheses that underlie the analysis of those cues. For specular objects, however one additional cue may be precisely the reflection of the environment: a deformed picture of the surrounding scene can be seen on the surface of the specular object and amount and type of deformation depend upon its shape. Our research is aimed at understanding how the human visual system uses this cue in shape perception and what is the relationship relating deformations and local geometry of the surface. To this effect, we assume a simple calibrated scene composed of lines passing through a point (e.g. a checkerboard pattern). Under these hypotheses, we demonstrated that local information about the geometry of the surface can be fully recovered up to third order from orientation and local scale of the reflected images of (at least) two intersecting lines.
10:00-11:00 ???
11:00-12:00 Taubin (B&H 328)
12:00-1:00 Talk (Savarese; B&H 190)
1:00-2:00 Lunch
2:00-3:00 Kimia (B&H 320)
3:00-4:00 Cooper (B&H 318)
4:00-5:00 Demos at LEMS (B&H 317) and SHAPE Lab. (B&H 313)
10:00-10:30 ???
10:30-11:00 Mundy (B&H 351)
1:00-2:00 Lunch
2:30- Black (CS 521)