Kavita Bala

"Modeling and representing materials in the wild"

(Vortrag im Rahmen der "MPI Distinguished Lecture Series" in Kooperation mit dem Fachbereich Informatik)

Our everyday life brings us in contact with a rich range of materials that contribute to both the utility and aesthetics of our environment. Human beings are very good at using subtle distinctions in appearance to distinguish between materials (e.g., silk vs. cotton, laminate vs. granite). In my group we are working on understanding how we perceive materials to drive better graphics and vision algorithms.

In this talk I will present OpenSurfaces, a rich, labeled database consisting of thousands of examples of surfaces segmented from consumer photographs of interiors, and annotated with material parameters, texture information, and contextual information. We demonstrate the use of this database in applications like surface retexturing, intrinsic image decomposition, intelligent material-based image browsing, and material design. I will also briefly describe our work on light scattering for translucent materials and realistic micron-resolution models for fabrics. Our work has applications in many domains: in virtual and augmented reality fueled by the advent of devices like Google Glass, in virtual prototyping for industrial design, in ecommerce and retail, in textile design and prototyping, in interior design and remodeling, and in games and movies.

Bio: Kavita Bala is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at Cornell University. She received her PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Bala leads research projects in physically-based scalable rendering, perceptually-based graphics, material perception and acquisition, and image-based modeling and texturing. Her group's scalable rendering research on Lightcuts is the core rendering technology in Autodesk's cloud rendering platform.

Bala's professional activities include Chair of SIGGRAPH Asia 2011, co-Chair Pacific Graphics (2010) and the Eurographics Symposium on Rendering (2005), Papers Advisory Board for SIGGRAPH and SIGGRAPH Asia, Senior Associate Editor for TOG, and Associate Editor for TVCG and CGF. She has received the NSF CAREER award, and Cornell's College of Engineering James and Mary Tien Excellence in Teaching Award (2006 and 2009).