Revealing the Invisible

  • Fredo Durand | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

I will first give a brief overview of recent results about a compiler for high-performance image processing, an authoring tool for online video lectures, and Metropolis light transport. The main part of the talk will introduce a number of techniques that reveal variations that are too small to be seen in regular video. I will introduce Eulerian video magnification and show how simple temporal processing can amplify not just color changes but also spatial motion. I will then introduce a new approach based on complex-valued steerable pyramids that can better capture local motion and significantly improves the quality of the results. Finally, I will demonstrate that heart rate can be extracted from regular videos, not just by analyzing color variations but also by analyzing imperceptible head motion.

Speaker Details

Frédo Durand is an associate professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He received his PhD from Grenoble University, France, in 1999, supervised by Claude Puech and George Drettakis. From 1999 till 2002, he was a post-doc in the MIT Computer Graphics Group with Julie Dorsey. He works both on synthetic image generation and computational photography, where new algorithms afford powerful image enhancement and the design of imaging system that can record richer information about a scene. His research interests span most aspects of picture generation and creation, with emphasis on mathematical analysis, signal processing, and inspiration from perceptual sciences. He co-organized the first Symposium on Computational Photography and Video in 2005 and was on the advisory board of the Image and Meaning 2 conference. He received an inaugural Eurographics Young Researcher Award in 2004, an NSF CAREER award in 2005, an inaugural Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellowship in 2005, and a Sloan fellowship in 2006.

Series: Microsoft Research Talks