Research Statement in Computer Vision

Figure 1: Consensus framework for low-level vision, using binocular stereo as an example. (a) Window-based stereo matching with a slanted-plane model reduces ambiguity, but it requires guessing the correct window shapes and sizes throughoutt he scene. Consensus addresses this by explicitly considering all regions at all locations (depicted as a 2D cartoon (b) and in 1D organized by scale (c)). It reasons simultaneously about which regions are inliers to the slantedplane model and the correct slanted plane for each inlying region. The regional slanted planes must agree where they overlap, and in the objective this implies high-order factors that link the variables of thousands of regions that overlap each pixel (blue in (b) and (c)). When regions are organized hierarchically (red/pink in (b)), optimization becomes parallel and efficient. (d) The result is a distributed architecture, with computational units that iteratively perform the same set of computations and share information sparsely between parents and children. The framework can be applied to a variety of low-level tasks using a variety of regional models.