When: Friday, July 10, 1:00 p.m.

Where: 1507 Newell-Simon Hall

Ariel Shamir,
Associate Professor
The School of Computer Science
The Interdisciplinary Center, Israel

Special Robotics Seminar

Abstract:
Content aware resizing of images and video gained popularity lately, and users can now choose from a battery of methods to retarget their media. However, no single retargeting operator performs well on all images and all target sizes. At times, even simple operators such as uniform scaling or cropping can give the best results. In this work we propose an algorithm that can combine several operators, aiming at utilizing the best of each of them. We define a resizing space as a conceptual multi-dimensional space combining several resizing operators and show how a path in this space defines a sequence of operations to retarget media. To measure resizing results we define a new image similarity measure, termed Bi-Directional Warping (BDW) whose goal is to capture both the content and structure of images. We use BDW with a dynamic programming algorithm to find an optimal path in the resizing space. We also show an intuitive user interface allowing users to explore the resizing space interactively. Using key-frames and interpolation we extend the technique to retarget video, providing the flexibility to use the best combination of operators at different times in the sequence.

Joint work with Michael Rubinstein and Shai Avidan to be presented at SIGGRAPH 2009.

Ariel Shamir is an associate professor at the school of Computer Science at the Interdisciplinary Center in Israel. He received his Ph.D. in computer science in 2000 from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He spent two years as a post-doctoral fellow at the center for computational visualization at the University of Texas in Austin. During 2006 he held the position of visiting scientist at Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs in Cambridge MA.

His research interests include geometric modeling, computer graphics, visualization, and machine learning. He has numerous publications in journals and international refereed conferences, and holds several grants from the Ministry of Science and Technology in Israel and Israel Science Foundation. He also has a broad commercial experience both managing and consulting several commercial companies, and co-authored several patents. He is a member of the ACM SIGGRAPH, IEEE Computer and Eurographics societies. Ariel Shamir is currently visiting Disney Research Labs in Pittsburgh.

Faculty Host: Jessica Hodgins
Appointments: jkh@cs.cmu.edu

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