🚀 go-pugleaf

   **  Steven W. Zucker  **
           of
     Research Center for Intelligent Machines
     McGill University



                ** Shapes, Shocks, and Deformations **

                        Tuesday,  November 10
                             7:00 P.M. 
                      New Technology Building 
                         Walter Light Hall
                            Room 205
                    **   Queen's University  **

The shape of objects lies at the interface between vision and cognition,
however general theories of shape have been notoriously difficult to
formulate.  We undertake to develop a general theory of shape by
elucidating several principles which any such theory should meet.  The
principles are organized around two basic intuitions:  first, if a boundary
were changed only slightly, then, in general, its shape would change only
slightly. This leads us to propose an operational theory of shape based on
incremental contour deformations.  The second intuition is that not all
contours are shapes, but rather only those that can enclose "physical"
material.  A novel theory of contour deformation is derived from these
principles, based on abstract conservation principles and Hamilton-Jacobi
theory.  The result is a characterization of the computational elements of
shape:  deformation, parts, bends, and seeds, which show where to place the
components of a shape.  The theory unifies many of the diverse aspects of
shape, and leads to a space of shapes (the reaction/diffusion space) which
places shapes within a neighborhood of "similar" ones.  Such similarity
relationships underlie descriptions suitable for recognition.


Steven W. Zucker is a Professor of Electrical Engineering at McGill
University, Director of the Program in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics
of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research,  and the Co-Director of
the Computer Vision and Robotics Laboratory in the McGill Research Center
for Intelligent Machines. He was elected a Fellow of the Canadian Institute
for Advanced Research, and a Fellow of the IEEE.  Zucker has made
significant contributions to the areas of computational vision, image
processing, artificial intelligence, biological perception, and robotics.
Among his recent contributions are a computational model of curve
detection, and a theory of shape perception and recognition.