Polarization, as an intrinsic property of light, provides an extra dimension of information for probing the physical world. Many insects can see and make use of polarized light. For example, bumble bees use the sky’s polarization pattern for fast navigation. The polarization of light is often overlooked in computer vision, as human eyes do not have such sensitivity. However, it turns out that reasoning on the polarization state of light allows for more efficient geometry and material analysis than using the conventional color images alone. In this talk, I will talk about my works that use polarized light for 3D reconstruction and material understanding. I will first explain the principles of polarization sensing and the modeling of polarimetric appearance. I will then showcase several imaging solutions that use polarized light for high fidelity 3D reconstruction in challenging scenarios. I will show applications of these imaging solutions in VR, robotics and scientific imaging.
Zoom link: https://umd.zoom.us/j/2148418519
Jinwei Ye is an associate professor of Computer Science at George Mason University. Before that, she was an assistant professor at Louisiana State University (2017–2021). She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Delaware in 2014. Before joining academia, she was a postdoctoral fellow at US Army Research Lab (2014–2015), and a senior researcher at Canon U.S.A. (2015–2017). Her research interests are at the intersection of computer vision, computational imaging, and computer graphics. Her works are supported by NSF and ARL. She received the NSF CAREER awards in 2023. She served in the senior program committee (area chair) and organizing committee for many computer vision and AI conferences, including CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, AAAI, IJCAI, and ICCP.