As part of SFU’s Distinguished Lecture Series, we are excited to have Richard Szeliski from Google DeepMind / University of Washington.

Richard Szeliski

Date: Thursday, Feb 27th, 2024

Time: 11:30 AM - 12:30 PM PST

Location: TASC 1 9204, Burnaby campus

Talk Title: Reflections on Image-Based Rendering

Abstract: Image-based rendering, which combines computer vision and computer graphics techniques to create photorealistic novel views of complex real-world scenes, has been an active area of research for over thirty years. In this talk, I give a high-level retrospective of this field and make connections to the field of neural rendering, which has the same goals but uses deep networks as its primary tool. Starting with the basics of geometry-driven view interpolation and the theory of light fields and Lumigraphs, I review representational issues such as layers and opacity, view-dependent appearance, and modeling reflections and transparency. I also discuss some applications such as 360 and 3D photos and videos. I close by connecting classic techniques to their modern neural rendering counterparts and discuss some of our recent work on 3D scene rendering and stochastic animation from still images.

Biography: Richard Szeliski is a Distinguished Scientist at Google DeepMind and an Affiliate Professor at the University of Washington. He is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the ACM and IEEE. Prof. Szeliski has done pioneering research in the fields of Bayesian methods for computer vision, image-based modeling, image-based rendering, and computational photography, which lie at the intersection of computer vision and computer graphics. His research on Photo Tourism, Photosynth, and Hyperlapse are exciting examples of the promise of large-scale image and video-based rendering. Prof. Szeliski received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1988. He joined Google Research (now Google DeepMind) in 2022 after retiring from Facebook as the founding Director of the Computational Photography in 2020. Prior to Facebook, he worked at Microsoft Research for twenty years as well as several other industrial research labs. He has published over 200 research papers in computer vision, computer graphics, neural networks, and numerical analysis, as well as the books Computer Vision: Algorithms and Applications and Bayesian Modeling of Uncertainty in Low-Level Vision. He was a Program Chair for CVPR’2013 and ICCV’2003, served as an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence and on the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Computer Vision, and was a Founding Editor of Foundations and Trends in Computer Graphics and Vision.