Photographing events over time

May 17, 2011
Bill Freeman | MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL)

Artists and scientists have used photography to portray events occurring over a broad range of timescales, from pico-seconds to tera-seconds. I’ll review some of the hardware and computational techniques used to create photographs over these different timescales.
The talk addresses work by artists, photographers, and computer scientists, including the artists Haas, Salavon, Funch, Jones, the photographers Marey, Muybridge, Haas, Prokudin-Gorskii, Doc Edgerton, and research from Microsoft, U. Washington, MIT, Harvard, Google, and Berkeley. Describing events at the short time scales is mostly a hardware issue. In contrast, capturing events over longer time scales often involves tracking objects or removing changes in illumination or viewpoint, and thus is a computational problem. There is still much to be done to capture and convey events over long timescales well.

Speaker Details

Bill Freeman is a Professor of Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, having joined the faculty in 2001. His current research interests include machine learning applied to computer vision and graphics, and computational photography.

Dr. Freeman is active in the program and organizing committees of the major computer vision, graphics, and machine learning conferences. He was the program co-chair for the International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) in 2005, and will be the program co-chair for Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) in 2013.

From 1981 – 1987, he worked at Polaroid, developing image processing algorithms for electronic cameras and printers. In 1987-88, he was a Foreign Expert at the Taiyuan University of Technology , P. R. of China. From 1992 – 2001 he worked at Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL), in Cambridge, MA, as Sr. Research Scientist and Associate Director. He holds 30 patents and is an IEEE Fellow. A hobby is flying cameras in kites.