DLS in Graphics

The last decade has seen great progress in 3D shape capture technology, both in terms of research advances and successful commercial systems. So why don't most people own 3D cameras? Aside from such issues as expense and size, there remain fundamental technical problems that restrict the applicability of the current state of the art. One of these problems is modeling realistic materials, such as skin, vegetation, wood, leather, or hair, that reflect light in interesting and complex ways and are therefore difficult to model analytically. Another major limitation is that very few techniques exist that can capture moving scenes. Obtaining accurate and complete models of moving scenes is challenging, due to the limited measurements that can be obtained at each instant in time.

In this talk, I will describe new work from my research group that seeks to address these two problems, i.e., 3D modeling of realistic materials and moving scenes. We have recently developed shape capture methods that can capture scenes with general reflective properties, including shiny surfaces and even anisotropic materials like brushed fur. I will also describe techniques that yield high-resolution shape reconstructions of moving faces.

Steve Seitz is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. He received his B.A. in computer science and mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley in 1991 and his Ph.D. in computer sciences at the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1997. Following his doctoral work, he spent one year visiting the Vision Technology Group at Microsoft Research, and subsequently two years as an Assistant Professor in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He joined the faculty at the University of Washington in July 2000. He was twice awarded the David Marr Prize for the best paper at the International Conference of Computer Vision, and has received an NSF Career Award, an ONR Young Investigator Award, and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship.