Student Talks
Modeling and Estimating Non-rigid Image Deformation
Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: Non-rigid deformations of surfaces and volumes result in complex distortions in images. Modeling deformation can help better understand such real-world phenomena and extract useful information about the scenes. This is closely related to many core vision tasks, such as image alignment, matching, tracking, detection and recognition. Modeling deformation remains challenging because [...]
Distributed Algorithms for Constrained Multi-robot Dynamic Task Assignment with Formal Performance Guarantees
Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: The task assignment problem is one of the fundamental combinatorial optimization problems. It has been extensively studied in operation research, management science, computer science and robotics. In multi-robot systems (MRS), there are various applications of task assignment, such as environmental monitoring, search and rescue, disaster response, extraterrestrial exploration, sensing data collection [...]
Fast and Graceful Balancing Mobile Robots
Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: Personal mobile robots will soon be operating and closely interacting with us in human environments. Balancing mobile robots can be effective personal robots as they can be tall enough for eye-level interaction and narrow enough to navigate cluttered environments, and they also have the dynamic capabilities to move with speed and [...]
Distributed Planning Under Uncertainty for Large Teams
Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: In many domains, teams of hundreds of agents must cooperatively plan to perform tasks in a complex, uncertain environment. This requires that each agent take into account teammates' states, observations, and actions when making decisions about its own actions. Naively, finding a good policy involves searching this large joint space, but [...]
Vision-Based Control of a Handheld Micromanipulator for Robot-Assisted Retinal Surgery
Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: Surgeons increasingly need to perform complex operations on extremely small anatomy. Many existing and promising new surgeries are effective, but difficult or impossible to perform because humans lack the extraordinary control required at sub-millimeter scales. Using micromanipulators, surgeons gain higher positioning accuracy and additional dexterity as the instrument removes tremor and [...]
Context and Subcategories for Sliding Window Object Recognition
Event Location: NSH 3305Abstract: Object recognition is one of the fundamental challenges in computer vision, where the goal is to identify and localize the extent of object instances within an image. The current de facto standard for building high-performance object category detectors is the sliding window approach. This approach involves scanning an image with a [...]
Lifelong Robotic Object Recognition
Event Location: NSH 3305Abstract: In this thesis, we study the topic of Lifelong Robotic Object Perception. We propose, as a long-term goal, a framework to recognize known objects and to discover unknown objects in the environment as the robot operates, for as long as the robot operates. We build the foundations for Lifelong Robotic Object [...]
Data-Driven Geometric Scene Understanding
Event Location: NSH 3305Abstract: In this thesis proposal, we describe a data-driven approach to leverage repositories of 3D models for scene understanding. Our ability to relate what we see in an image to a large collection of 3D models allows us to transfer information from these models, creating a rich understanding of the scene. We [...]
Robust Natural Language Direction Following through Unknown Environments
Event Location: GHC 4405Abstract: Commanding robots through unconstrained natural language directions is intuitive, flexible, and does not require specialized interfaces or training. Providing this capability would enable effortless coordination in human robot teams that operate in non-specialized environments. However, natural language direction following through unknown environments requires understanding the structure of language, mapping verbs and [...]
Model Recommendation for Action Recognition and Other Applications
Event Location: GHC 4405Abstract: The typical approach to learning based vision has been that for each individual application, classifiers or detectors are learned anew from annotated training data for each specific task. However, the classifiers trained in this way tend to be brittle and highly specialized to the datasets from which they are derived, making [...]