CMU talk: Rain in Vision and Graphics

Special VASC Seminar
Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Rain in Vision and Graphics
Kshitiz Garg
intuVision

Abstract:
Rain produces sharp intensity fluctuations in images and videos which severely degrade the performance of outdoor vision systems. Considering that bad weather is common, a city like New York has bad weather 23% of time, it is important to remove the visual effects of rain to make outdoor vision robust. In contrast, in graphics, rain effects are desirable. They are often used in movies to convey scene emotions and in other graphics applications, such as games, to enhance realism. In this talk, I will present rain from the perspective of vision and graphics. I will show how physics based modeling of the visual appearance of rain leads to efficient algorithms both for handling its effects in vision and for its realistic rendering in graphics. I will also briefly discuss some of the recent projects I have done on recognition and tracking at intuVision.


Bio:
Kshitiz Garg is a research scientist and software developer at intuVision. His research interests are in the areas of computer vision, pattern recognition and computer graphics. He has a Masters in Physics and a PhD. in Computer Science from Columbia University, NY. He specializes in physics-based modeling and algorithm development. During his graduate work he developed physics based models for the intensity fluctuations produced by rain in images. He is also interested in Computer Graphics and has developed efficient algorithms for realistic rendering of rain. Since joining the intuVision team, he has worked on algorithms to improve object tracking and recognition especially in the presence of background motion, illumination changes and shadows. He is the research lead for development of intuVision's object classification, face detection, and soft biometry algorithms.