Computer Vision News - November 2016

ECCV Daily: What does he have that you recommend to other advisors? Emma: I think he has a willingness to engage with any sort of project. You look at his work, and he has advised so many unique projects that are even unique from each other. It’s all tied together in a physics based perspective, but the other guys in my lab do totally different projects from me. That’s been true for as long as he has had students. He’s very eager to help his students pursue their own ideas, and he’s willing to go out on a limb to try very unusual, niche projects. It’s very motivating. ECCV Daily: Are you going to teach one day? Emma: I hope to! I hope that if I ever advise a student or an employee that I can be half the mentor that my advisor is. ECCV Daily: What are the next steps in your work? Emma: There’s a lot - We found this whole new cue that really hasn’t been explored at all. There’s decades of engineering work that has been done on similar cues like optical flow. We haven’t explored that space at all. That includes everything from adding a regularization term to training a deep net. We really don’t know what’s out there on a performance side. In terms of the math, there’s a more general principle behind this camera. We use a combination of motion and defocus to get depth measurements, but in fact a constraint like this will hold for any system with a differential change in defocus. We were inspired by a biological system that seems to be using this principle. We are following up with biologists who confirm or deny that that is the algorithm being used. We’re also categorizing all of the different novel sensors that can use this camera. We’re talking fabrication on our next model. We’re hoping to get the full picture on a family of cameras, not this cue specifically, but very closely related cues. ECCV Daily: Any funny story about this project? Emma: Yes! At one point in this project, I was taking care of 25 spiders in a closet in our computer science building. The reason for it, “Taking care of 25 spiders in a closet in our computer science building. For one year” 14 Our Pick at ECCV BEST OF ECCV