Dr. Larry Davis
Sight and Sound: Visual Surveillance and Virtual Acoustic Environments
Wednesday April 24, 2002
Building 8 Auditorium - 3:30 PM
(Refreshments at 3:00 PM)

Dr. Larry Davis, will present Sight and Sound:Visual Surveillance and Virtual Acoustic Environments. He will discuss research being conducted in two areas at the Computer Vision Laboratory - First, visual surveillance of human activity and second the creation of acoustic user interfaces through spatial audio. His group has been working on the problems of detecting, tracking and analyzing human activity from video for the past decade. The first part of this talk will survey that research, including demonstration on videos from the NASA space station that derives from an ongoing SBIR project with Foster Miller Corporation.

The second part of the talk will describe research being conducted under a National Science Foundation ITR Grant. The research focuses on the problem of spatial audio – the creation of personalized three dimensional audio spaces as part of advanced virtual environments. The main goal of this project is to develop algorithms for using computer vision to measure the detailed geometry of the ear to efficiently construct the so-called head related transfer function (HRTF) of an individual, and then to use this HRTF in conjunction with room models to render realistic spatial audio in real time. It is hoped that this capability can be used in the future to construct acoustic user interfaces for both sighted and visually impaired people. As part of his talk, Dr. Davis will briefly describe plans in this area.

Dr. Larry S. Davis received his B.A. from Colgate University in 1970 and his M. S. and Ph. D. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland in 1974 and 1976 respectively. From 1977-1981 he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Texas, Austin. He returned to the University of Maryland as an Associate Professor in 1981. From 1985-1994 he was the Director of the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. He is currently a Professor in the Institute and the Computer Science Department, as well as Chair of the Computer Science Department at the University of Maryland. He was named a Fellow of the IEEE in 1997. Dr. Davis is known for his research in computer vision and high performance computing. He has published over 75 papers in journals and has supervised over 12 Ph. D. students. He is an Associate Editor of the International Journal of Computer Vision and an area editor for Computer Models for Image Processor: Image Understanding. He has served as program or general chair for most of the field’s major conferences and workshops, including the 5th International Conference on Computer Vision (the field’s leading international conference) and the upcoming International Conference on Face and Gesture Recognition, to be held in Washington D.C. in May 2002.

IS&T Colloquium Committee Host: Jacqueline LeMogine
lemoigne@backserv.gsfc.nasa.gov