Event Location: NSH 1507
Bio: Robert Pless is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, where he founded and directs the Media and Machines Lab. His research focus are big-data and geometric approaches to Visual Computing, with applications to social justice and environmental measurement. Dr. Pless has a Bachelors Degree in Computer Science from Cornell University in 1994 and a PhD from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2000. He received the NSF CAREER award in 2006. He is currently Program Chair of the 2016 IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision in 2016. While visiting I’m also excited to talk about other work on Visual Computing for Social Justice, large scale agricultural monitoring, and to share a story of finding a 30 year old lost gravesite.

Abstract: Imaging systems like the Lytro and the Panoptic Studio try to capture all of the light travelling in all directions — the light field. This talk poses an inverted question: Can we find or create situations where the light field is structured so that standard cameras can make better visual measurements? Many natural phenomena that create light fields simplify the measurement of outdoor scenes. Also, cheap common materials can be used to create light fields with special properties. For many measurement and calibration tasks, these this light field structure converts sparse potential measurements into denser measurements that confer more accuracy. I will share a vision of opportunities to apply these to better robotic pose estimation, virtual reality scene capture and smartphone based measurements in real environments.