The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

Finding correspondence between 3D shapes is one of the prototypical problems in computer graphics, geometric processing, and vision. Different flavors of this problem arise in applications ranging from texture mapping and animation to marker-less motion capture. The recent progress in the development of commercial real-time 3D scanning technology has brought the need for fast, accurate, and reliable correspondence methods capable of dealing with real-world noise and artifacts. Particularly hard settings of the correspondence problem include non-rigid correspondence (where the shapes are allowed to undergo deformations), partial correspondence (where a subset of the shape has to be matched to its deformed full version), and geometric and topological noise (the latter arising, for example, due to occluded parts in the acquisition process).

In this talk, I will show some recent results on computing partial correspondence between deformable shapes expressed in the spectral domain. Our main theoretical result is a perturbation analysis of the Laplacian operator, giving a bound on the change in its eigenvectors as a result of part removal. Based on this observation, we develop a generalization of functional maps capable of dealing with partial correspondence, clutter, and topological noise in very challenging settings.

(based on joint works with E. Rodola', L. Cosmo, J. Masci, A. Torsello, D. Cremers, O. Litany, A. Bronstein)

Bio:
Michael Bronstein is an associate professor of Informatics at USI Lugano (Switzerland) and associate professor of Applied Mathematics at TAU. He is also a Principal Engineer at the Intel Perceptual Computing group. Michael got his Ph.D. in Computer Science (2007) from the Technion. His main research interests are theoretical and computational methods in spectral and metric geometry and their application to problems in computer vision, pattern recognition, computer graphics, and machine learning. His research appeared in international media and was recognized by numerous awards. In 2012, Michael received the highly competitive ERC starting grant. In 2014, he was invited as a Young Scientist to the World Economic Forum, an honor bestowed on forty world's leading scientists under the age of 40. Besides academic work, Michael is actively involved in the industry. He was the co-founder of the Silicon Valley start-up company Novafora, where he served as VP of technology (2006-2009), responsible for the development of algorithms for large-scale video analysis. He was one of the principal inventors and technologists at Invision, an Israeli startup developing 3D sensing technology acquired by Intel in 2012 and released under the RealSense brand. This technology can now be found in new generation computers from all the major brands.