Center for Visual Computing Revolutionizing the way we capture, image and display the visual world. At the UC San Diego Center for Visual Computing, we are researching and developing a future in which we can render photograph-quality images instantly on mobile devices. A future in which computers and wearable devices have the ability to see and understand the physical world just as humans do. A future in which real and virtual content merge seamlessly across different platforms. The opportunities in communication, health and medicine, city planning, entertainment, 3-D printing and more are vast… and emerging quickly. To pursue these kinds of research projects at the Center for Visual Computing, we draw together computer graphics, augmented and virtual reality, computational imaging and computer vision. Unique Capabilities and Facilities Our immersive virtual and augmented-reality test beds in UC San Diego’s Qualcomm Institute are an ideal laboratory for our software-intensive work which extends from the theoretical and computational to 3-D immersion. Join us in building this future. Unbuilt Courtyard House by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. This rendering demon- strates how photon mapping can simulate all types of light scattering. MOBILE VISUAL COMPUTING INTERACTIVE DIGITAL UNDERSTANDING PEOPLE AND AND DIGITAL IMAGING (AUGMENTED) REALITY THEIR SURROUNDINGS • New techniques to capture the visual • Achieving photograph-quality images • Computer vision systems with human- environment via mobile devices at interactive frame rates to enable level understanding of gestures, scene the rendering of digital reality in real • Improved computational imaging and semantics, activities and groups of time computer vision in the wild people • Seamless rendering and mixing of • Advanced rendering on a variety of • Medical, biological and city-planning real and virtual content in real time mobile platforms applications CENTER FOR VISUAL COMPUTING COMPUTER SCIENCE David Kriegman Nuno Vasconcelos AND ENGINEERING One of the most widely cited experts on the sub- Leader in fundamental and applied problems ject of face recognition, with applications in social in computer vision, image processing, machine Ravi Ramamoorthi networking, robotics, human-computer interac- learning, and multimedia. Focused on devel- Theoretical foundations, mathematical represen- tion and homeland security. Uses machine learn- opment of intelligent systems that combine tations and computational models for the visual ing, geometry and physics applied to computer image-understanding capabilities with additional appearance of objects, digitally recreating or graphics, medical imaging, electron microscopy information to enable sophisticated recognition, rendering the complexity of natural appearance. and coral ecology. parsing, retrieval, classification, indexing, brows- His work on spherical harmonic lighting and irra- ing, modeling, and compression of visual content. diance environment maps is widely used in movie Tzu-Mao Li production and video games. Li’s research focuses on the interactions between three domains: visual computing, programming COGNITIVE SCIENCE Manmohan Chandraker systems, and statistical learning. His work added Leader of collaborations with the automobile in- 3D understanding to computer vision models; Zhuowen Tu dustry aiming towards low-cost, real-time visual used data to improve camera imaging pipeline Intersection of computer vision, machine systems for navigation, recognition and predic- quality; and made light transport simulation learning, neural computation and cognition, and tion in traffic scenes. Theoretical frameworks and faster by using information implicitly defined by neuroimaging. Focused on statistical learning/ practical systems for applications in autonomous rendering programs. computing models for structured, large-scale, driving, robotics, security and human-computer and multi-modal data prediction. His research has interfaces. Hao Su broad applications, notably for medical imaging. Leader in using machine learning to understand Albert Chern geometry data for computer vision, graphics, and With backgrounds in both numerical analysis and robotics. Theoretical and algorithmic research QUALCOMM INSTITUTE differential geometry, Chern studies the interplay to understand structures, shapes and scenes. between differential geometry, algebraic topol- Recent work on large-scale 2-D/3-D dataset Tom DeFanti ogy, differential equations and computational construction and deep learning algorithms for heterogeneous representations are foundational. Leader of teams that have developed the CAVE mathematics. His research resulted in successful virtual reality (VR) systems and large-scale and novel applications in fluid dynamics, geome- 10/40/100 Gbps networks. Co-PI of the Pacific try processing, as well as classical numerical PDE Research Platform that connects 20 major uni- challenges. ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER versities for data-intensive computing. Building ENGINEERING machine learning ecosystems. Henrik W. Jensen Photon mapping algorithm for simulating global Xiaolong Wang Jürgen Schulze illumination in complex, three-dimensional Wang studies data structure for learning visual Making interactive 3-D visualization systems scenes used in architecture, design and visual representations and its connection to 3D and easier to use, including visual display of the data effects for film. First to render translucent mate- semantic structures. He uses structure informa- and input paradigms. He uses high-end clustered rials such as snow, marble, milk and human skin. tion from the data itself as a supervisory signal graphics systems, such as virtual reality CAVEs, Academy Award winner for technical achieve- for learning visual representations; and explic- to immerse users in the data and 3-D tracked in- ment in 2004. itly models data structure for human activity put devices, smartphones and tablets to interact analysis, scene affordance reasoning and learning with virtual reality systems. object interaction. CONTACT US Ravi Ramamoorthi Anthony Radspieler Jr. CENTER DIRECTOR DIRECTOR RONALD L. GRAHAM PROFESSOR Corporate Research Partnerships Computer Science and Engineering [email protected] [email protected] +1 (858) 822-1483 +1 (858) 534-6254 v 2104 v University of California San Diego Center for Visual Computing Jacobs School of Engineering viscomp.ucsd.edu.