Computing Realistic Images
of the World Around Us

  Humans are visual creatures, and so the ability to   reproduce accurate images of the world around us is an important challenge. Dr. Sen will speak about his research into faster generation of photorealistic images and ways to apply high dynamic range (HDR) techniques to moving scenes and even video.

First, we'll examine photorealistic image synthesis, which involves generating an image from a scene description. The most powerful methods for this are based on Monte Carlo (MC) algorithms, but they are plagued by noise at low sampling rates, which makes them impractical for many applications and has limited their use.  We've proposed a new way to think about the source of Monte Carlo noise and use this understanding to create an image-space filter that removes MC noise but preserves important scene detail. This enables the generation of photorealistic images in a few minutes that are comparable to those that took hundreds of times longer to render.

  Second, we'll discuss recent developments for high dynamic range (HDR) imaging.  Although the world has high dynamic range illumination (meaning that the darkest and brightest parts of a scene differ in intensity by many orders of magnitude), conventional digital cameras only capture a narrow portion of this range.  A common way to capture HDR images with a conventional camera is to take a set of images at different exposures and then merge them together.  This works well for static scenes, but produces visible ghosting artifacts for scenes with motion.  In the second half of his talk, Dr. Sen will present a new way to think about the problem of reconstructing HDR images from a set of inputs based on a new optimization that minimizes the HDR image synthesis equation.  Using this framework, we can produce results superior to previous techniques for HDR imaging and demonstrate how this approach can be extended to video as well.

Dr. Pradeep Sen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara.  He received his B.S. from Purdue University and his M.S. and Ph.D. from Stanford University.  His core research is in the areas of computer graphics, computational image processing, and computer vision. He is the co-author of six ACM SIGGRAPH papers and has been awarded more than $1.7 million in research funding, including an NSF CAREER award to study the application of sparse reconstruction algorithms to computer graphics and imaging.  He received two best-paper awards at the Graphics Hardware conference in 2002 and 2004.

This meeting is sponsored in part by the Santa Barbara News-Press

For information about the Science & Engineering Council.
visit the SEC web page at http://www.scieng.org 

From our Co-Presidents:
    This month we are pleased to welcome Robert Elliott of Solvang to Individual membership. We are also pleased to announce that the Scholarship Foundation has notified us that we have two winners, Christopher Newton and Christopher Siefe. Both are graduates of San Marcos High School and will attend UCSB in the fall. Siefe will continue as a junior chemical engineering student and Newton will be starting freshman year in the areas of science and math.
    We look forward to seeing you at the June 11th luncheon.
                                                                               -- Tim Murphy and Gary Kravetz