Humanoids09
9th IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots

By Olivier Faugeras
Odyssée laboratory, Sophia-Antipolis and Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris

Common practive in image processing, computer vision, and evidence from the neurophysiology of vision indicate that a great deal of the processing performed on the input flow of images by artificial or biological systems can be represented at a suitable abstract level by a set of mathematical equations of a certain type.

There is a deep and quite complex interplay between the geometry of the space of the solutions of these equations and the perception of the visual space that they are meant to represent. We describe in a pedestrian way the underlying neurophysiology and theory that involves bifurcation theory, Euclidean and hyperbolic geometry. We illustrate our ideas with several examples drawn from the perception/processing of edges, textures and motion and comment on their implications for biological and machine vision.

About the speaker

Olivier FAUGERAS is a graduate from the Ecole Polytechnique (1971). He holds a PhD in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from the University of Utah (1976) and a Doctorate of Science from Paris VI University (1981). He is currently Research Director at INRIA (National Research Institute in Computer Science and Control Theory), where he leads the Odyss´ee laboratory located in Sophia-Antipolis and Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris. His research interests include the application of mathematics to computer and biological vision, shape representation and recognition, the use of functional imaging (MR, MEG, EEG) for understanding brain activity and in particular visual perception. He has published extensively in archival Journals, International Conferences, has contributed chapters to many books and is the author of Artificial 3-D Vision published in 1993 by MIT Press and, with Quang-Tuan Luong and Tho Papadopoulo, of îThe Geometry of Multiple Images which appeared in March 2001, also at MIT Press. He has coedited with Nikos Paragios and Yunmei Chen The Handbook of Mathematical Models in Computer Vision published in 2005 by Springer. He was an adjunct Professor from 1996 to 2001 in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the AI Lab. He is an Associate Editor of several international scientific Journals including Machine Vision and applications, Videre, Image and Vision Computing. He has served as Associate Editor for IEEE PAMI from 1987 to 1990 and as co-Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Computer Vision from 1991 to 2004. In April 1989 he received the ìInstitut de France - Fondation Fiatî award from the French Academy of Sciences for his work in Vision and Robotics. In July 1998 he received the France Telecom award from the French Academy of Sciences for his work on Computer Vision and Geometry. In November 1998 he was elected a member of the French Academy of Sciences and was in 2000 one of the founding members of the French Academy of Technology.

URL : http://www-sop.inria.fr/odyssee/team/Olivier.Faugeras/index.en.html