Kevin's Weblog

The invided talk this morning was from David Salesin, "The Need for Machine Learning in Computer Graphics". The basic issue is that realistic CG is a lot of work. For example 100,000 man hours in The Perfect Storm. It requires good modeling and human expertise. The question is, can machine learning improve this situation. Unfortunately, the talk didn't actually have much to say about this, but was more a laundry list of possible specific questions to investigate.

Later, a "Graphical Model for Recognizing Scenes and Objects" was interesting. They extended conventional object finders to examine the full scene to give context to features, which vastly improved the success at identifying certain types of objects, for example, keyboards.

I skipped out on most of the wet-work talks. I did catch the tail of what seemed like an interesting talk about obstacle avoidance using custom designed analog chips which shows some analogs to insect vision.