CVPR Conference

CVPR is an annual conference in computer vision.  Experts and enthusiasts from industry and academics get together to review state-of-the-art techniques for estimating human pose, reconstructing 3D structure, and classifying people and objects based on color, intensity, and depth images.  Many techniques are based on principles in artificial intelligence and single- and multiple-view geometry.  The conference offered all-day workshops on particular fields, oral paper presentations, poster presentations, a demo booth, and exhibitors. 

This year, the conference was conveniently located in Colorado Springs, so I went with a fellow student and our adviser. The information was overwhelming for me, but there are a few highlights that I really enjoyed that I'd like to share with you.

1. NVidia, which makes high-end graphics cards, announced that it had implemented OpenCV on Android platform and had accelerated most of it on its Tegra2 platform.  OpenCV is a library, similar to OpenGL, for computer vision.  Almost everyone in the field uses it, with the exception of a few who use Matlab instead.  Android is the Google operating system for mobile devices, such as phones and tablets.  It is Java-based.  For last semester's Computer Graphics homework assignment, I had tried writing an application in Android with OpenCV, and had failed miserably.  I had tried four different approaches that all led to dead-ends ranging from build dependency errors to compilation errors to link errors to methods that simply did nothing when called.  I had also tried to use OpenGL shaders to accelerate a few OpenCV methods.  So, I am really excited about NVidia's announcement, and will enjoy trying it out, if I ever get a hold of an Android tablet with Tegra2 card.

2. Demonstration of Nao - a robot with high DOF mechanical arms and legs and big, bambi-like eyes. The exhibitor had a small red ball that he would throw on a table.  Nao would be able to "see" the ball and go after it.  It was really impressive to watch.  It looked like Nao had some other problems though - he wasn't good with voice commands yet.  After issuing a voice command, the exhibitor often had to thump Nao on the head several times before he responded.  Also, after a while, the exhibitor had to plug Nao in - apparently, he had a battery life of 1.5 hours.

3. Michael Black's keynote speech on understanding human activity, and the entire workshop on human activity.  This requires a post to itself, so that will follow.

4. Often, when I read papers, there are certain points or terms in equations that I don't understand, or questions I have about potential applications and extensions of the work.  Those questions tend to go unanswered.  So, in preparation for the conference, I tried to select, in advance, all the paper presentations I wanted to attend so I could get familiar with them beforehand.  There ended up being 40+ that I was interested in, but I didn't have time to read so much, so I picked four to print out and read.  Of these, I ended up reading only one.  I had two questions about it after reading it, and was very thrilled to be able to talk to the author in-person and get them both answered.  So, finally I can claim there is one paper out there that I feel I understand totally.