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Materials in the wild
Associate Professor Kavita Bala - Computer Science Department at Cornell University
Friday, February 27, 2015, 11:00 am-12:00 pm Calendar
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Abstract

Our daily lives bring us in contact with a rich range of materials that contribute to both the utility and aesthetics of our environment.  Human beings are remarkably good at perceiving subtle distinctions in material appearance (e.g., is this fabric silk or cotton? is this surface granite or laminate?).

In my group, we are working on understanding how humans perceive materials, and using this knowledge to drive better graphics and vision algorithms.

To make progress on understanding and modeling materials, we need large-scale data about real-world materials.  I will describe OpenSurfaces, a crowd-sourced database of thousands of material examples segmented from consumer photographs. I will show various uses of such large-scale material data in material recognition, intrinsic image decomposition, material-based image browsing and design.   This work has applications in many domains: in virtual and augmented reality, in e-commerce and retail, and in industrial and interior design.

 

Bio

Kavita Bala is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at Cornell University. She received her PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and her Bachelors from the Indian Institute of Technology (Bombay).  Bala leads research projects in material modeling and understanding, realistic rendering, perception, and computational lighting design.  Her group's scalable rendering engine, Lightcuts, is the core rendering technology in Autodesk's cloud rendering platform.

Bala chaired SIGGRAPH Asia Papers (2011), co-chaired Pacific Graphics (2010) and the Eurographics Symposium on Rendering (2005). She is Senior Associate Editor for Transactions on Graphics (TOG), and Associate Editor for TVCG and CGF.  She has received the NSF CAREER award, and Cornell's College of Engineering James and Mary Tien Excellence in Teaching Award (2006 and 2009).

 

 

 

This talk is organized by Adelaide Findlay