Microsoft Research Blog

Artificial intelligence

  1. RSLAM: A System for Large-Scale Mapping in Constant-Time Using Stereo 

    August 31, 2011

    Large scale exploration of the environment requires a constant time estimation engine. Bundle adjustment or pose relaxation do not fulfil these requirements as the number of parameters to solve grows with the size of the environment. We describe a relative simultaneous localisation and mapping system…

  2. Geodesic Forests for Image Editing 

    August 11, 2011 | Toby Sharp, Antonio Criminisi, and Patrick Perez

    A Geodesic Forest is a new representation of digital color images which yields flexible and efficient editing algorithms. In this paper an image is decomposed into a collection of trees (a forest) whose branches follow directions of minimum variation. This representation enables expensive, 2D, edge-aware…

  3. KinectFusion: real-time dynamic 3D surface reconstruction and interaction 

    August 7, 2011

    We present KinectFusion, a system that takes live depth data from a moving Kinect camera and in real-time creates high-quality, geometrically accurate, 3D models. Our system allows a user holding a Kinect camera to move quickly within any indoor space, and rapidly scan and create…

  4. Geodesic Image and Video Editing 

    August 1, 2011 | Antonio Criminisi, Toby Sharp, Carsten Rother, and Patrick Perez

    This article presents a new, unified technique to perform general edge-sensitive editing operations on n-dimensional images and videos efficiently.The first contribution of the article is the introduction of a Generalized Geodesic Distance Transform (GGDT), based on soft masks. This provides a unified framework to address…

  5. Optimizing subpixel rendering using a perceptual metric 

    July 31, 2011

    — ClearType is a subpixel-rendering method designed to improve the perceived quality of text. The method renders text at subpixel resolution and then applies a one-dimensional symmetric mean-preserving filter to reduce color artifacts. This paper describes a computational method and experimental tests to assess user…

  6. PAC-Bayesian learning with asymmetric cost 

    June 27, 2011 | Ashley J. Llorens and I-Jeng Wang

    PAC-Bayes generalization bounds offer a theoretical foundation for learning classifiers with low generalization error and predicting their performance on unseen data. Current formulations implicitly assume that the relative cost of misclassifying a positive or negative example is reflected by the class skew in the training…

  7. Online learning with minority class resampling 

    May 21, 2011 | Michael J. Pekala and Ashley J. Llorens

    This paper considers using online binary classification for target detection where the goal is to identify signals of interest within a sequence of received signals generated by a shifting background. In this setting, we assume there is significant class imbalance (100∶1 or greater), the sequence…

  8. Harvesting Image Databases from the Web 

    April 1, 2011 | F. Schroff, Antonio Criminisi, and A. Zisserman

    The objective of this work is to automatically generate a large number of images for a specified object class. A multimodal approach employing both text, metadata, and visual features is used to gather many high-quality images from the Web. Candidate images are obtained by a…

  9. Robust linear registration of CT images using random regression forests 

    March 3, 2011

    Global linear registration is a necessary first step for many different tasks in medical image analysis. Comparing longitudinal studies1, cross-modality fusion2, and many other applications depend heavily on the success of the automatic registration. The robustness and efficiency of this step is crucial as it…