Invited Talk

Perceiving the 3D World from Images and Video

Lourdes Agapito

2021 Invited Talk

Abstract

As humans we take the ability to perceive the dynamic world around us in three dimensions for granted. From an early age we can grasp an object by adapting our fingers to its 3D shape; understand our mother’s feelings by interpreting her facial expressions; or effortlessly navigate through a busy street. All these tasks require some internal 3D representation of shape, deformations, and motion. Building algorithms that can emulate this level of human 3D perception, using as input single images or video sequences taken with a consumer camera, has proved to be an extremely hard task. Machine learning solutions have faced the challenge of the scarcity of 3D annotations, encouraging important advances in weak and self-supervision. In this talk I will describe progress from early optimization-based solutions that captured sequence-specific 3D models with primitive representations of deformation, towards recent and more powerful 3D-aware neural representations that can learn the variation of shapes and textures across a category and be trained from 2D image supervision only. There has been very successful recent commercial uptake of this technology and I will show exciting applications to AI-driven video synthesis.

Speaker

Lourdes Agapito

Lourdes Agapito holds the position of Professor of 3D Vision at the Department of Computer Science, University College London (UCL). Her research in computer vision has consistently focused on the inference of 3D information from single images or videos acquired from a single moving camera. She received her BSc, MSc and PhD degrees from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain). In 1997 she joined the Robotics Research Group at the University of Oxford as an EU Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow. In 2001 she was appointed as Lecturer at the Department of Computer Science at Queen Mary University of London. From 2008 to 2014 she held an ERC Starting Grant funded by the European Research Council to focus on theoretical and practical aspects of deformable 3D reconstruction from monocular sequences. In 2013 she joined the Department of Computer Science at University College London and was promoted to full professor in 2015. She now heads the Vision and Imaging Science Group, is a founding member of the AI centre and co-director of the Centre for Doctoral Training in Foundational AI. Lourdes serves regularly as Area Chair for the top Computer Vision conferences (CVPR, ICCV, ECCV) was Program Chair for CVPR 2016 and will serve again for ICCV 2023. She was keynote speaker at ICRA 2017, the top robotics conference, and is a member of the executive committee of the British Machine Vision Association. In 2017 she co-founded Synthesia, the London based synthetic media startup responsible for the AI technology behind the Malaria no More video campaign that saw David Beckham speak 9 different languages to call on world leaders to take action to defeat Malaria.

Video

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