Materials in the Wild

Talk
Kavita Bala
Cornell University
Time: 
11.20.2015 11:00 to 12:00
Location: 

CSI 2117

Video File: 

Our daily lives bring us in contact with a rich range of materials. Human beings are remarkably good at perceiving subtle distinctions in material appearance (e.g., is this fabric silk or cotton? is this surface granite or laminate?). My group is working on understanding how humans perceive materials, and using this knowledge to drive better material modeling and recognition in graphics and vision. I will describe our recent work in modeling of cloth and translucent materials.For material recognition, we have built large-scale, crowdsourced databases of materials and objects from consumer photographs. I will describe how we use these large-scale datasets for scene understanding, intrinsic image decomposition, and material-basedimage browsing and design. This work has applications in many domains: in virtual and augmented reality, in e-commerce and retail, and inindustrial and interior design.