🚀 go-pugleaf

****************** ROBOTICS INSTITUTE SEMINAR SERIES ******************

Omnidirectional Vision in Immersive Environments

Kostas Daniilidis
Grasp Laboratory
Department of Computer and Information Sciences
University of Pennsylvania

Adamson Wing, Baker Hall
Talk 3:30 pm
Refreshments 3:15 pm

Abstract

Surround perception is crucial for an immersive sense of presence in
communication and for efficient navigation and surveillance in
robotics. To enable surround perception, new omnidirectional systems
were designed which gave a new impetus for rethinking the way images
are acquired and analyzed.  Based on insights gained from such designs,
we formulate a novel unifying theory of imaging.  We prove that all
single viewpoint mirror-lens devices are equivalent to projective
mappings from the sphere to the plane.  These mappings are paired with
a duality principle which relates points to line projections.  The
commonly used parabolic mirror projection is shown to be equivalent to
the stereographic projection, providing therefore the invariants of a
conformal mapping.  It turns out that conventional cameras, which are
only a special case in our theory, provide the barest minimum of
information about the environment.

Immersive environments involve focusing on the interaction with a
person.  In these cases, omnidirectionality means looking from
different directions inwardly, to a focused point. Utilizing a camera
cluster pointed to a person from multiple directions, we developed a
first testbed for viewpoint independent scene acquisition in real-time.
3D descriptions obtained from multiple trinocular reconstructions are
transmitted over the Internet to a remote site, where a spatially
augmented display provides an immersive rendering of the remote person
and scene. We address the algorithmic issues involved in achieving a
real-time and yet visually compelling reconstruction.


Speaker Biography

Kostas Daniilidis is Assistant Professor of Computer and Information
Science, University of Pennsylvania, affiliated with the
interdisciplinary GRASP laboratory.  He obtained a PhD in Computer
Science from the University Karlsruhe, 1992 (advisor: Hans-Hellmut
Nagel) and a Dipl.-Ing.  from the National Technical University of
Athens, 1986.  Prior to his current appointment he was with the
Cognitive Systems Group, University of Kiel. Nowadays, his research
centers on omni-directional vision, vision sensors, and vision
techniques for tele-immersion. Daniilidis is the chair of the first
workshop on Omnidirectional Vision, June 2000. He has served as Program
Co-Chair of the CAIP-97 conference, as member of the Program Committee
at ICPR-96, ICPR-00, and CVPR-98, and he is reviewer in multiple
journals.

Speaker Appointments

For appointments, please contact the host, Bob Collins at
rcollins@ri.cmu.edu.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Robotics Institute is part of the School of Computer Science, Carnegie
Mellon University. 


This page can be found on the world wide web at
http://www.ri.cmu.edu/seminar/2000.april.21.

This page maintained by Salvatore Domenick Desiano (sal@ri.cmu.edu).