This three-year award supports U.S.-France cooperative research in computer vision. The projects involves U.S. investigators, Gerard Medioni, University of Southern California, Eric Grimson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dan Huttenlocher, Cornell University, Jean Ponce, University of Illinois and French investigators, Nicolas Ayache and Olivier Faugeras of INRIA (French National Institute for Computer Science and Applied Mathematics). The research addresses vision research concerning geometric reasoning in a three dimensional environment. Current research in computer vision has advanced from reasoning in two dimensions to reasoning about three dimensional objects in the physical world. The objective of the research is to simultaneously investigate the themes of segmentation, representation of visual information and matching models with real images and vice versa. The collaboration takes advantage of complementary U.S. and French expertise. The U.S. investigators have extensive experience in the computer vision. This is complemented by French investigators expertise in three-dimensional representation and their approach utilizing differential geometry of surfaces and variational methods. Geometric reasoning in a three dimensional environment will bring computer vision closer to reality. It has broad applications in many fields such as navigation, automatic planning, assembly and inspection in manufacturing.
