Computer Vision News - November 2016

like I mentioned that there was a biological system involved, is that the jumping spider gets its name because it jumps. It will leap several body lengths to catch prey or to get from place to place. It has very accurate depth vision. It also eats about a house fly a week, which works out to a power budget around 700 microwatts. It’s in the place that we wanted to build sensors. There’s a long standing biological mystery as to how they do this, but a recent behavioral study showed that they are actually using defocus as their depth cue. From the computer vision literature, defocus tends to be very expensive to process. You wouldn’t think that if you wanted to build a very power constraint system that you would use that cue. You would want to use stereo or something simpler. We saw this and thought that there must be a short cut. We found a short cut. Then we wanted to see if this is what they are doing or is there something else, another short cut. We were going to design an optical illusion and confirm or deny our algorithm. It turns out that the behavioral biology is really hard, and we didn’t get any results from that. Still, there was a period of time where I was feeding flies to spiders every week. I learned a lot about that. They lived out their entire, natural life spans happily which was under a year. We got them as adults so it was only a few months. It turns out you can have spiders sent to you in the mail from, let’s say, interesting individuals on the internet. I learned a lot that I didn’t expect to in the course of my computer science PhD so far. ECCV Daily: So as a computer science engineer, you dedicated one year of your life to feeding spiders? Emma: Eventually, they were more like “lab pets”. It was something where I went in and did it for 15 minutes. They were like mascots. It was like having a dog, but easier. ECCV Daily: Did you give them names? Emma: No, I didn’t. I figured that would just make me sad… [ she laughs ] “Like lab pets” “There’s a long standing biological mystery as to how they do this” Our Pick at ECCV 15 This amazing dance performance rocked the Royal Theatre Carré in Amsterdam at the opening ceremony of ECCV2016. BEST OF ECCV