education

Physorg reports that Arturo Flores, a student at the University of California, San Diego, has built a computer vision system that removes pedestrians from Google Street View images. Mr. Flores' system used existing detection software to locate pedestrians and replaced their pixels with pixels of the corresponding background taken from other images. The technique works best when the backgrounds are planar. The project was done for a computer vision course taught by Professor Serge Belongie and has been published in the IEEE International Workshop on Mobile Vision.

OpenCV (The Open Source Computer Vision Library) has been accepted as a mentoring organization in Google's Summer of Code 2010 program. Potential topics of interest for student projects include, among others, augmented reality, photo stitching, motion analysis, GUI, parallelization, and implementing OpenCV on new platforms such as 64-bit OSX and Android. For more info, see Willow Garage's Summer of Code mentorship page for the OpenCV project.

Researchers from University of Massachusetts Amherst (Beverly Park Woolf and Ivon M. Arroyo) and Arizona State University (Winslow Burleson) are developing intelligent computerized tutors in the Wayang Outpost project. The system incorporates a variety of sensors to detect students' emotions. For example, a camera is used to detect facial expression.

Columbia professor Shree Nayar has launched a project to use cameras to educate children. The BigShot camera is a kit that children can easily assemble within an hour. The assembly process is designed to teach children about important science and technology concepts such as optics, mechanics, image processing, and the human eye. Professor Nayar is currently seeking a for-profit or non-profit partner to produce BigShot, with sales of full-price kits subsidizing donations of kits to children less able to afford them. Further information is available at bigshotcamera.org.

A computer vision project won first place in IEEE Canada's national capstone competition. The winning project, "Multi-Touch Multi-User Interactive Surface Using Computer Vision," was built by students at Concordia University advised by Professor M. Reza Soleymani. The $10,000 prize was sponsored by TELUS, a Canadian telecom company.

Professor Michael J. Black and his students in a graduate computer vision class at Brown University assisted a police department in asking for leads in a homicide case. Harry T. Phillips Jr., 39, was killed in 2005 in a convenience store in Henrico County, Virginia, USA. The students sharpened surveillance camera images, which were released to the public by the Police Department in the hope of getting new information about the crime.

According to a press release, members of the Innovative Teachers Network have free download access of AutoCollage, a computer vision and image processing software from Microsoft Research that automatically creates montages of digital photos. The goal is to provide teachers with new tools to create dynamic visual content for the classroom.

The 2009 edition of the International Computer Vision Summer School (ICVSS) will teach Machine Learning for Computer Vision. The summer school will be held July 6-11 in Sicily. Twelve speakers from academia and industry will teach the course. The application deadline is March 21.