Computer Vision Trip To Korea

BACKGROUND

Last semester, Grant Schindler, a PhD student in Frank Dellaert’s group in the Robotics and Intelligent Machines Center, travelled to Korea to present his research and Japan to attend a conference in the field of computer vision. Here’s what he had to say about his travels.

WHAT PROJECT LED TO YOUR TRIP?

I’m doing computer vision research on the 4D Cities project, which involves reconstructing 3D models of cities from historical photos.The key is that these 3D models change over time as cities are built up, and a user can then explore both the photographs and the 3D city models as they change over time.

WHY DID YOU END UP GOING TO SOUTH KOREA?

Samsung is sponsoring the development of a 4D Cities platform so that anyone can build a 4D City model like the one we have already built for Atlanta (http://4dcities.cc.gatech.edu/atlanta).Their research center is based in Suwon, South Korea, so I traveled there to begin our collaboration by showing them our current software and giving a talk on my previous research. This collaboration came about through Georgia Tech’s STAR center (www.star. cc.gatech.edu).

WHERE IN THE COUNTRY DID YOU TRAVEL?

In Korea, I spent my time in Suwon near Samsung’s research facility. I flew next to Tokyo, met up with a colleague, and took the Shinkansen bullet train to Kyoto for a conference. On the way back from Japan, I spent one night in Seoul before flying home to Atlanta.All told, the trip took almost 2 weeks.

DID YOU HAVE ANY INTERESTING CROSS-CULTURAL ENCOUNTERS?

My hosts at Samsung took me out for a wonderful Korean dinner at a traditional restaurant in the countryside.The food was wonderful, lots of interesting flavors and textures -- and we got to sit on the floor.

AFTER KOREA,YOU WENT TO JAPAN FOR A CONFERENCE. COULD YOU DESCRIBE THAT A BIT?

ICCV is the International Conference on Computer Vision, which is held every two years in a different country. It’s the top computer vision conference, and there’s always exciting research presented.

DID YOU PRESENT ANYTHING, OR WERE YOU JUST ATTENDING AS A SPECTATOR?

I presented a poster at a workshop -- workshops are small mini-conferences on more specialized computer vision topics that occur before or after the main conference.This was work primarily by Mingxuan Sun on how to create a consistent set of 3D building textures from historical photos that vary widely in appearance and lighting.

Buddhist temple with 1000 golden statues protected by some amazing 800-year-old guardian deity statues that look almost like modern anime characters.The free-roaming urban deer in the city of Nara were also quite an interesting sight.

WHAT WAS THE MOST INTERESTING PROJECT YOU SAW AT THE CONFERENCE?

There was a lot of great research on display, but in particular, there were several really nice projects out of the University of Washington -- one called “Building Rome in a Day” involves fast automatic 3D reconstructions of cities from user-submitted and tagged Flickr images.Another was “Reconstructing Building Interiors from Images” which performs a similar task for indoor environments.The results from both of these projects are visually impressive.

IS THERE ANYTHING ELSE YOU’D LIKE TO TALK ABOUT IN JAPAN?

Tokyo was interesting from a cultural perspective.The Akihabara electronics district is a must-see in Tokyo for any CS major, and especially for video game enthusiasts. Kyoto has beautiful historical sites, old wooden temples, and palaces. My favorite was Sanjusangendo, a Buddhist temple with 1000 golden statues protected by some amazing 800-year-old guardian deity statues that look almost like modern anime characters. The freeroaming urban deer in the city of Nara were also quite an interesting sight.