New developments in range sensors make it possible to quickly acquire 3D information with relatively low cost. In this talk, I will present a brief overview of computer vision research activities at Sarnoff. The talk will focus on exploitation of 3D data for automatic mapping, modeling and object recognition. We will first discuss techniques for aligning 3D point data sets from frame based LIDAR scanners and automatically constructing very large maps and 3D models of urban and rural areas.

We will also present techniques for the automatic recognition and classification of 3D objects observed by 3D sensors using a very large database of articulated 3D models. We have developed a coarse-to-fine indexing and matching approach for sub-linear, scalable 3D object recognition using semi-local features and global geometric constraints Our methods achieve a probability of correct identification (Pid) of greater than 0.95 for objects in the clear and 0.90 for targets with up to 50% occlusion.


Bio
Dr. Rakesh "Teddy" Kumar is currently the Technical Director of the Media Vision Laboratory at Sarnoff Corporation, Princeton, New Jersey. Prior to joining Sarnoff, he was employed at IBM. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1992. His technical interests are in the areas of computer vision, computer graphics, image processing and multimedia. At Sarnoff, he has been directing and performing commercial and government research and development projects in the areas of video surveillance and monitoring, video and 3D exploitation and analysis, object recognition, immersive tele-presence, 3D modeling, medical image analysis and multi-sensor registration. His laboratory executes on over 12M $ of R&D projects every year. He has been one of the principal founders from Sarnoff for multiple spin-off and spin-in companies: VideoBrush, LifeClips and Pyramid Vision Technologies.

Rakesh Kumar received the Sarnoff Technical Achievement awards in 1994 and 1996 for his work in registration of multi-sensor, multi-dimensional medical images and alignment of video to three dimensional scene models respectively. He was an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence from 1999 to 2003. He is an Area Chair for IEEE Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR'2004), Program Chair for the first and second IEEE Workshop on Video Registration (IVR' 2001 and 2004) and the Fourth IEEE Workshop on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV'98) and has served on the program committee of a number of computer vision conferences and National Science Foundation review panels. He has co-authored more than 30 research publications and has received over 12 patents, with numerous others pending.