Event Location: NSH 1305
Bio: Frédo Durand is an associate professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He received his PhD from Grenoble University, France, in 1999, supervised by Claude Puech and George Drettakis. From 1999 till 2002, he was a post-doc in the MIT Computer Graphics Group with Julie Dorsey.

He works both on synthetic image generation and computational photography, where new algorithms afford powerful image enhancement and the design of imaging system that can record richer information about a scene. His research interests span most aspects of picture generation and creation, with emphasis on mathematical analysis, signal processing, and inspiration from perceptual sciences. He co-organized the first Symposium on Computational Photography and Video in 2005, the first International Conference on Computational Photography in 2009, and was on the advisory board of the Image and Meaning 2 conference. He received an inaugural Eurographics Young Researcher Award in 2004, an NSF CAREER award in 2005, an inaugural Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellowship in 2005, a Sloan fellowship in 2006, and a Spira award for distinguished teaching in 2007.

Abstract: This talk reviews efforts to reveal visual content that is invisible to the naked eye. We will briefly discuss traditional optical solutions and will then describe recent computational techniques that can extract faint visual information from digital sensors, analyze it, amplify it, and visualize it. In particular, we will present techniques that take motion that is too small to be seen in regular video and re-render a video where the amplitude of the motion has been amplified.