Amit Shesh Department of Computer Science "SMARTPAPER: Reconstruction of Line Drawings by Optimization" Thursday February 10th, 12:20-12:45, Lind 409

Abstract

I am currently working on a design-by-sketches system, SMARTPAPER. This project envisions to empower the designer of the 21st century with powerful tools promoting design of objects by hand-drawn sketches instead of awkward mouse point-and-click operations. Portable tablet devices such as tablet PCs will be essential tools for the mobile designer of tomorrow, and sketching applications such as SMARTPAPER will help the designer to communicate his/her ideas to customers through easily understandable sketches, avoiding the extra work required to design prototype models for customers and formal diagrams for technicians separately.

The main challenges in this project are reconstruction of 3D models from rough freehand 2D sketches and provision of an easy and intuitive user interface using commodity computing hardware, so that designers in many professions can adapt to this revolutionary design method easily. More details about this project can be found on the SMARTPAPER web page.

Liron Yatziv Department of Electrical Engineering "Fast Image and Video Colorization using Chrominance Blending" Thursday February 10th, 12:45-1:10, Lind 409

Abstract

Colorization, the task of coloring a gray-scale image or video, involves assigning from the single dimension of intensity or luminance a quantity that varies in three dimensions, such as red, green, and blue channels. Mapping between intensity and color is therefore not unique, and colorization is ambiguous in nature and requires some amount of human interaction or external information. A computationally simple yet effective approach of colorization will be presented and demonstrated in this talk. An online demo is available at http://mountains.ece.umn.edu/~liron/colorization/.