Illuminating Light Transport
Srinivasa Narasimhan
Abstract
This talk will discuss how to model, measure, interpret and control light
transport in volumetric media such as murky water, bad weather, and
translucent materials. Historically, the field of computer vision has
focused on a specific type of light transport --- direct surface
reflection from opaque surfaces immersed in vacuum. We will show several
applications where volumetric light transport must be taken in to account:
(a) controlling illumination to increase visibility underwater, (b)
controlling the focus of illumination to acquire shapes of objects that
exhibit strong subsurface scattering and interreflections, (c) real-time
rendering of fog, haze and rain to be used for movies and video games,
and, (d) measuring optical properties of every day liquids such as wines,
milks, juices, particulate solutions, ocean water, etc for rendering.
Bio:
Srinivas Narasimhan is an Assistant Professor in the Robotics Institute at
Carnegie Mellon University. He received his Masters and Doctoral degrees
in Computer Science with distinction from Columbia University in 2000 and
2004 respectively. His research interests are in light transport analysis
and computational illumination and imaging for applications in vision,
graphics and robotics. His work on vision in bad weather received a Best
Paper Honorable mention award in IEEE CVPR 2000 and his work on medical
endoscopy received the Adobe Best Paper award in the IEEE Workshop on
Photometric Analysis in Computer Vision (ICCV 2007). He received the NSF
CAREER award in 2007.