Event Location: NSH 1305
Bio: Bruce Maxwell is an Associate Professor and chair of Computer Science
at Colby College in Maine. He received a B.A. in Political Science and
a B.S. in Engineering with a concentration in Computer Science from
Swarthmore College, an M. Phil. from Cambridge University, and a
Ph.D. in Robotics from the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon
University. His primary research interests are computer vision,
robotics, computer graphics, data mining and visualization. He has
been part of Tandent Vision Science since its inception, focusing on
understanding and modeling the appearance of objects under varying
illumination conditions.

Abstract: This talk will present a comprehensive model for understanding the
appearance of objects that exhibit both body and surface reflection
under realistic illumination. Specifically, the model represents the
appearance of surfaces that interact with a dominant illuminant and a
non-negligible ambient illuminant that may have different spectral
power distributions. Real illumination environments usually have an
ambient illuminant, and the current dynamic range of consumer cameras
is sufficient to capture significant information in shadows. The bi-
illuminant dichromatic reflection model explains numerous empirical
findings in the literature and has implications for commonly used
chromaticity spaces that claim to be illumination invariant but are
not in many natural situations. One outcome of the model is the first
2-D chromaticity space for an RGB image that is robust to
illumination change given dominant and ambient illuminants with
different spectral power distributions.