Event overview
A picture is sometimes worth a thousand words. In this Whitehead Lecture, Dr John Collomosse (University of Surrey) presents his work on the use of free-hand sketches for the online search & manipulation of images and video.
The internet is transforming into a visual medium; over 80% of the internet is forecast to be visual content by 2018, and most of this content will be consumed on mobile devices featuring a touch-screen as their primary interface.
Gestural interaction (such as sketching) presents an intuitive way to interact with these devices. Imagine a Google image search in which specify your query by sketching the desired image with your finger, rather than (or in addition to) describing it with text words. Sketch offers an orthogonal perspective on visual search - enabling concise specification of appearance (via sketch) in addition to semantics (via text).
In this talk Dr John Collomosse will present a summary of his group's work on the use of free-hand sketches for the visual search and manipulation of images and video.
He will begin by describing a scalable system for sketch based search of multi-million image databases, based upon the state-of-the-art Gradient Field HOG (GF-HOG) algorithm. (Imagine a product catalogue in which you sketched, say, an engineering part, rather than using a text or serial numbers to find it)
He will then describe how scalable search of video can be similarly achieved, through the depiction of sketched visual narratives that depict not only objects but also their motion (dynamics) as a constraint to find relevant video clips. John will show that such visual narratives are not only useful for search, but can also be used to manipulate video through specification of a sketched storyboard that drives video generation (for example, design of novel choreography through a series of sketched poses).
The work presented in this talk was supported by the EPSRC and AHRC between 2012-2015.
BIOGRAPHY:
Dr John Collomosse is a Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Vision Speech and Signal Processing (CVSSP) at the University of Surrey. John joined CVSSP in 2009, following 4 years lecturing at the University Bath where he also completed his PhD in Computer Vision and Graphics (2004). John has spent periods of time at IBM UK Labs, Vodafone R&D Munich, and HP Labs Bristol.
John's research is cross-disciplinary, spanning Computer Vision, Computer Graphics and Artificial Intelligence, focusing on ways to add value and make sense of large, unstructured media collections - to visually search media collections, and present them in aesthetic and comprehensible ways. Recent projects spanning Vision and Graphics include:
- sketch based search of images/video
- plagiarism detection in the arts
- visual search of dance
- structuring and presenting large visual media collections using artistic rendering
- developing characters animation from 3D multi-view capture data.
John holds ~70 refereed publications, including oral presentations at ICCV, BMVC, and journal papers in IJCV, IEEE TVCG and TMM. He was general chair for NPAR 2010-11 (at SIGGRAPH), BMVC 2012, and CVMP 2014-15 and is an AE for C&G and Eurographics CGF.
About the Whitehead Lecture series
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 23 Mar 2016 | 4:00pm - 5:30pm |
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