Proposal: CNS 0454056 PI: Carlo Tomasi Institution: Duke University Program: NSF 04-588 CISE Computing Research Infrastructure CRI: A Core Experimental Facility for Computer Vision and Artificial Intelligence
Duke University will construct a facility for the measurement of three-dimensional shapes and the motion of human bodies, to be used for both training and performance evaluation of computer vision and artificial intelligence algorithms. Shapes will be measured with a high-quality laser range finder. Structured light, stereoscopic and monocular images of the same scene or object also will be collected from sensor systems of varying quality, and whose positions and orientations relative to the laser range finder are precisely known through calibration. Similarly, the motions in space of one or a few people will be recorded with an accurate motion capture system, as well as with several sets of color and black-and-white cameras and structured-light systems recording at the same time. Research project on stereo vision, robot localization, visualization, gesture analysis and dermatology are planned. The laser range finder and motion-capture system provide accurate training and ground-truth data, and the other sensors yield the type of input that a computer vision algorithm or an artificial intelligence inference system would use to determine or reason about a scene or an event. Because of the broad need for this data, the proposal also envisions the creation of a course on the principles underlying sensing and geometric measurements whose materials will also be made public, and of a web repository for the measurement data collected both at the facility and elsewhere.
