Seminar from Andrea Tagliasacchi

Wednesday, 25th September 2024, Andrea Tagliasacchi will give an invited seminar on “3D Computer Vision and its evolution: from depth sensor to novel view synthesis”.

The seminar will take place in room P2.3 - Building MO25, Dipartimento di Ingegneria “Enzo Ferrari” Via Vivarelli 10, 411125.

Abstract

Over the last decade, computer vision has undergone a remarkable transformation, with many difficult problems now considered solved. However, it is important to recognize that much of this progress is often confined to 2D images and videos, which only provide a superficial understanding of the underlying 3D structure. Achieving a comprehensive understanding of 3D scenes remains largely an unsolved challenge. Solving this problem is crucial as computer vision shifts from passive tasks, like search and surveillance, to more active applications that require 3D modeling, such as those that drive the decision-making processes of embodied autonomous systems interacting with the 3D environment. In this talk, I will present my research journey through these areas, beginning with real-time processing techniques for Kinect-style sensors in computer graphics, leading to the development of neural 3D representations and their unsupervised training through novel-view synthesis objectives

Biography

Andrea Tagliasacchi is an associate professor at Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, Canada) where he holds the appointment of Visual Computing Research Chair within the school of computing science. He is also a part-time (20%) staff research scientist at Google DeepMind (Toronto, Canada), as well as an associate professor (status only) in the computer science department at the University of Toronto. Before joining SFU, he spent four wonderful years as a full-time researcher at Google (mentored by Paul Lalonde, Geoffrey Hinton, and David Fleet). Before joining Google, he was an assistant professor at the University of Victoria (2015-2017), where he held the Industrial Research Chair in 3D Sensing (jointly sponsored by Google and Intel). His alma mater includes EPFL (postdoc) SFU (PhD, NSERC Alexander Graham Bell fellow) and Politecnico di Milano (MSc, gold medalist). Several of his papers have received best-paper award nominations at top-tier graphics and vision conferences: he is the recipient of the 2015 SGP best paper award, the 2020 CVPR best student paper award, and the 2024 CVPR best paper award (honorable mention). His research focuses on 3D visual perception, which lies at the intersection of computer vision, computer graphics and machine learning.