Visual Computing and Ubiquitous Imaging

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Modern mobile phones are power houses of Visual Computing. For visual output, they provide a high-quality color display, and some models have dedicated hardware for 2D and 3D computer graphics. For visual input they have good digital cameras, both still and video. And they provide a fast CPU, some models even an FPU, as well as C++, Python, and Java programming environments. The Visual Computing and Ubiquitous Imaging (VCUI) team studies how these visual capabilities can be harnessed for exciting applications.

Research topics

Mobile Augmented / Mixed Reality
Mobile Computational Photography

Our work on augmented reality uses hints of location from a GPS or other signal sources (cell tower ID, WLAN station, Bluetooth beacon) and real-time image processing to build systems that recognize where the device and the user are, and what they are looking at. Based on recognized target the user can be given additional information in form of text, web links, overlaid graphics, etc. Applications range from personal navigation guide to tourist guide to any location-based services to outdoor and table top gaming.

We also work on mobile imaging. Camera phones are a good platform for computational photography. With the same device you can take several images, and then process them to create new images that you could take with a single shot using a normal digital camera. Instead of waiting until you can later process the images on a PC, we'd like to provide the instant gratification of seeing the results when you still are interested in the topic and can take additional input images if needed.

Resources

Our team released NokiaCV, a computer vision library for S60 smart phones.

Collaboration

We have recently collaborated with Profs. Bernd Girod, Leo Guibas, and Marc Levoy (Stanford), Gaetano Borriello (University of Washington), Ramesh Raskar (MIT Media Lab), Blair MacIntyre (Georgia Tech), and others.

Contact

Kari Pulli, Team Leader

Team members

Alumni

Interns

2009: Noha El-Yamany | Chia-Kai Liang