Speaker: Takeo Kanade
Affiliation: U. A. and Helen Whitaker Professor
The Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890
Date: 9/17/99 - Friday
Time & Location: 2:30PM, 101 Phillips
Title: Virtualized Reality: Digitizing a 3D Time-Varying
Real Event As Is and in Real Time
I will present the CMU Virtualized
Reality project. Digital imaging of two-dimensional pictures is common today.
Capturing an entire 3D scene or even a time-varying event into a computer as a
3D form, however, is very difficult and rarely done. Imagine a few players
playing basketball on a court. Can we digitize the whole scene into a computer
as a "3D event", not as a collection of pictures, but as its
three-dimensional, time-varying, and volumetric/surface representation? If we
could do so, we can use the representation for various purposes. For example, we
can think of a "soft" camera - creating images from any arbitrary
viewpoints and angles at which there were not cameras originally. With a soft
camera, one can see the basketball game from any view point independent of
physical limitations or other viewers' interest: from inside of the court, from
the referee's point of view, or even from the ball's eye point of view. Image
rendering, however, is not the only application. We can archive, manipulate,
combine, and alter real events - a whole new notion of "event archiving and
manipulation".
For this purpose we have been
developing computer vision technologies with the 3D Room - a fully digital room
that can capture events occurring in it by many (at this moment 50) video
cameras. I will describe the theory, facility, computation, and results of the
project.
Takeo Kanade - Bio
Takeo Kanade received his Doctoral
degree in Electrical Engineering from Kyoto University, Japan, in 1974. After
holding a faculty position at Department of Information Science, Kyoto
University, he joined Carnegie Mellon University in 1980, where he is currently
Director of the Robotics Institute and U. A. Helen Whitaker University Professor
of Computer Science. Dr. Kanade has performed research in multiple areas of
robotics: vision, manipulators, autonomous mobile robots, and sensors, and has
written more than 150 technical papers and 10 patents.
Dr. Kanade has been elected to the
National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of ACM, and a
Founding Fellow of American Association of Artificial Intelligence. He has
received several awards, including the Joseph Engelberger Award, JARA Award, and
a few best paper awards at international conferences and journals. Dr. Kanade
has served for many government, industry, and university advisory boards,
including Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board (ASEB) of National Research
Council, NASA's Advanced Technology Advisory Committee (Congressionally mandate
committee) and Advisory Board of Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.