Alvy Ray Smith Co-Founder of Pixar

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Alvy Ray Smith Co-founder of Pixar Dr Alvy Ray Smith is the co-founder of two successful startups: Pixar, an animation studio which was sold to Disney, and Altamira, a software company which was sold to Microsoft. Smith also co-founded the Lucas film Computer Division which developed computer graphics software including early renderer technology. As director of the Computer Graphics Project, he created and directed the "Genesis Demo" in The Wrath of Khan, and conceived and directed the short animated film The Adventures of Andre and Wally B., starring the animator John Lasseter. He proposed and negotiated the Academy-Award winning Disney computer animation production system, CAPS. Smith was an original member of the Computer Graphics Lab of the New York Institute of Technology and was the First Graphics Fellow at Microsoft. While at Xerox PARC, he witnessed the birth of the personal computer and received two technical Academy Awards, for the alpha channel and digital paint systems. He invented the first full-colour paint program, the HSV (or HSB) colour transform, and the alpha channel. Smith was instrumental, as a Regent, in initiating the Visible Human Project of the National Library of Medicine and was a star witness in a trial that successfully invalidated five patents that threatened Adobe Photoshop. He was also active in the development of the HDTV standard. Smith holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University and an honorary doctorate from New Mexico State University. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a Fellow of the American Society of Genealogists. Smith is the creator of many pieces of computer art, including Sunstone in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. • [email protected] • +603 2301 0988 • www.londonspeakerbureau.com • The world’s leading speaker and advisory network .

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Blue Screen Matting
Blue Screen Matting Alvy Ray Smith and James F. Blinn Microsoft Corporation ABSTRACT allowed to pass through and illuminate those parts desired but is blocked everywhere else. A holdout matte is the complement: It is A classical problem of imaging—the matting problem—is separa- opaque in the parts of interest and transparent elsewhere. In both tion of a non-rectangular foreground image from a (usually) rectan- cases, partially dense regions allow some light through. Hence gular background image—for example, in a film frame, extraction of some of the color film image that is being matted is partially illu- an actor from a background scene to allow substitution of a differ- minated. ent background. Of the several attacks on this difficult and persis- The use of an alpha channel to form arbitrary compositions of tent problem, we discuss here only the special case of separating a images is well-known in computer graphics [9]. An alpha channel desired foreground image from a background of a constant, or al- gives shape and transparency to a color image. It is the digital most constant, backing color. This backing color has often been equivalent of a holdout matte—a grayscale channel that has full blue, so the problem, and its solution, have been called blue screen value pixels (for opaque) at corresponding pixels in the color image matting. However, other backing colors, such as yellow or (in- that are to be seen, and zero valued pixels (for transparent) at creasingly) green, have also been used, so we often generalize to corresponding color pixels not to be seen.
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