Nokia Research Center

I am a Research Fellow at Nokia, I head the Visual Computing and Ubiquitous Imaging research team at NRC Palo Alto.

I am also a docent at the University of Oulu.

Committees

• Eurographics Executive Committee 2003 - 2008
• Standardization work (Khronos: OpenGL ES, OpenVG, OpenCL, ...; JCP: M3G Mobile 3D Graphics [JSR-184, JSR-297])
• Program/papers committees: High Performance Graphics 2009; Eurographics 2009 Area "Interactive Visual Exploration of Heterogeneous Geospatial Information"; Eurographics Symposium on Rendering (EGSR) 2009; Mobile Computer Vision Workshop (MVC) 2009; Int. Symp. on Ubiquitous Virtual Reality (ISUVR) 2009; Symp. on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games 2008; Int. Conf. Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM) 2002 - 07; Multimedia on Mobile Devices (SPIE) 2006 - 08; Int. Symp. Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR) 2005 - 09; Eurographics 2005, 09; Int. Symp. Multimedia (ISM) 2005; Web3D 2003 - 04; PSIPS 2004; 3DPVT 2006; RISA 2000; reviewed SIGGRAPH papers on most years since mid 90's.

Computational Photography

Nokia is the biggest camera manufacturer, and you can program these cameras. I want to see what can be done with that combination.

Mobile Augmented Reality

I first started working on AR around 2000, but at that time we had hard time getting real time demos running on laptops. Now mobile phones have real time graphics, good cameras, GPS, internet, enough processing power to make them the ultimate handheld AR devices.

Mobile Graphics Standards

I've worked a lot on mobile computer graphics technologies. In particular, I've been involved with standardizing APIs such as OpenGL ES, versions 1.0, 1.1, and 2.0; M3G, Mobile 3D Graphics for Java MIDP, also known as JSR-184 (specs are here) and version 2.0 (JSR-297); and OpenVG. I also used to head the efforts for Nokia's implementations of those APIs. I've written papers, given courses, and written a book on these APIs.

Computer animation

While I was at MIT, I collaborated with Jovan Popovic (my host at MIT) and Eugene Hsu on learning and transferring animation styles (SIGGRAPH paper and slides), as well as with Jovan and Robert Wang on animating articulated and non-articulated meshes.

Modeling from range data

I used to do this a lot in my previous life as a PhD student at University of Washington and as a Research Associate at Stanford University (Digital Michelangelo project), but I haven't been very active on that for quite a while. I did write a paper to 3DIM on range and color registration while at MIT, though it should have been published much earlier as large part of the thinking and programming was done in 1997-98. ( slides)

Mobile programming

My (by now quite old) Symbian programming page is here.

Experience

• Research Fellow, Nokia, Oulu, Finland, 7/99 -- 5/04; Cambridge, MA, USA 6/04 -- 8/06; Palo Alto, CA, USA 8/06 --
  Figuring out how mobile communications can use graphics and imaging and vice versa.
• Visiting Scientist, MIT CSAIL, Cambridge, MA 6/04 -- 8/06
  More graphics research.
• Docent, University of Oulu, Finland 5/00 --
  Teaching computer graphics, supervising M.Sc. theses.
• Research associate, Stanford University, 1/98 -- 6/99
  Technical lead, Digital Michelangelo Project.
• Internship, Alias|Wavefront, Seattle, WA, 6/96 -- 9/96.
  Research: hierarchical editing of subdivision surfaces.
• Internship, Silicon Graphics, Inc., Mountain View, CA, 6/95 -- 9/95.
  Fast rendering of subdivision surfaces on Onyx Reality Engine, a possible extension to OpenGL. Included microcoding of the graphics engines and writing an interactive subdivision surface editor using Inventor and Motif libraries.
• Internship, Microsoft, Seattle, WA, 6/94 -- 9/94.
  3D graphics, porting SoftImage's Creative Environment into NT, building an emulator for running programs written for SGI and old GL on OpenGL and Windows.
• Research assistant, University of Washington, 9/93 -- 12/97.
  Research in model-based vision using probabilistic models; surface reconstruction from a set of unregistered range and color views.
• Research scientist, Radiology Clinic, University hospital in Oulu, Finland, 8/93 -- 9/93.
  Design and partial implementation of a system that tracks movement of a tumor as patient breaths.
• Research scientist, University of Oulu, Finland, 9/91 -- 7/93.
  Developing of range vision software for a robotic paper roll manipulator. (Licentiate thesis)
• Research assistant University of Paderborn, Germany, 12/90 -- 8/91.
  Implementing a 3D computer graphics rendering system for a transputer based system. (Master's thesis)
• Internships, Bayer AG, Leverkusen, Germany, summers '88, '89, and '90.
  User interface programming for data base applications.

Awards

• Khronos Award for contributions on mobile media API standardization 2006
• Nokia Quality Award 2004, 1st place, on the research, standardization, and productizing work on mobile 3D graphics
• Finnish Academy Scholar at the University of Washington (twice: 1994-95 and 1996-97)
• Fulbright scholar 1993-94 at the University of Washington
• The Finnish Technical Society's national prize (1st place) for the "Diploma (Master's) thesis of 1991"
• "Ambassador of Good Will" Rotary International scholar at the University of Paderborn, Germany in 1990-91

Education

• Executive MBA, Univ. of Oulu, 06/01
• Ph.D. (Comp. Sci.), Univ. of Washington, 12/97
• M.Sc. (Comp. Sci.), Univ. of Washington, 6/95
• Lic.Tech. (Comp. Eng.), Univ. of Oulu, 5/93
• M.Sc. (Electr. Eng.), Univ. of Oulu, 10/91
• B.Comp.Sci., Univ. of Minnesota, 6/90

Languages

Roughly in the order of proficiency: Finnish, English, German, Swedish, Italian, Spanish, French.

Marius Tico, Kari Pulli

Image Enhancement Method via Blur and Noisy Image Fusion
2009 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP'09), Cairo, Egypt, Nov 7-10, 2009.

Kari Pulli, Wei-Chao Chen, Natasha Gelfand, Radek Grzeszczuk, Marius Tico, Ramakrishna Vedantham, Xianglin Wang, Yingen Xiong

Mobile Visual Computing
International Symposium on Ubiquitous Virtual Reality (ISUVR'09), GIST, Gwangju, South Korea, July 8-11, 2009.

Duy-Nguyen Ta, Wei-Chao Chen, Natasha Gelfand, Kari Pulli

SURFTrac: Efficient Tracking and Continuous Object Recognition using Local Feature Descriptors
IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR'09), Miami, Florida, June 20-25 2009.

Orazio Gallo, Wei-Chao Chen, Natasha Gelfand, Marius Tico, Kari Pulli

Artifact-free High Dynamic Range Imaging (slides and pictures)
IEEE International Conference on Computational Photography (ICCP'09), San Francisco, CA, April 16-17, 2009.

Gabriel Takacs, Vijay Chandrasekhar, Natasha Gelfand, Yingen Xiong, Wei-Chao Chen, Thanos Bismpigiannis, Radek Grzeszczuk, Kari Pulli, Bernd Girod

Outdoor Augmented Reality on Mobile Phone using Loxel-Based Visual Feature Organization (slides)
ACM International Conference on Multimedia Information Retrieval (MIR'08), Vancouver, Canada, October 2008.

Tolga Capin, Kari Pulli, Tomas Akenine-Möller

The State of the Art in Mobile Graphics Research
IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, Volume 28, Issue 4, pp. 74-84, Jul.-Aug. 2008.

Sami Kyöstilä, Kari J. Kangas, Kari Pulli

Tracy: A Debugger and System Analyzer for Cross-Platform Graphics Development (slides)
Graphics Hardware 2008, Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, June 2008.

Andrew Adams, Natasha Gelfand, Kari Pulli

Viewfinder Alignment
Eurographics 2008, pp. 597-606, Crete, Greece, April 2008.

Kari Pulli, Jani Vaarala, Ville Miettinen, Robert Simpson, Tomi Aarnio, Mark Callow

Mobile 3D Graphics
A course at Eurographics 2008, Crete, Greece, April 2008.

Kari Pulli, Tomi Aarnio, Ville Miettinen, Kimmo Roimela, Jani Vaarala

Mobile 3D Graphics with OpenGL ES and M3G
Morgan Kauffman, 2007.

Robert Y. Wang, Kari Pulli, Jovan Popović

Real-Time Enveloping with Rotational Regression (slides)
SIGGRAPH 2007, Article No. 73, San Diego, USA, August 2007.

Kari Pulli, Jani Vaarala, Ville Miettinen, Robert Simpson, Tomi Aarnio, Mark Callow

The Mobile 3D Ecosystem
A course at Course 25 at SIGGRAPH 2007, San Diego, USA, August 2007.

Kari Pulli, Jani Vaarala, Ville Miettinen, Tomi Aarnio, Mark Callow

Developing Mobile 3D Applications with OpenGL ES and M3G
A course at Course T3 at Eurographics 2006, Vienna, Austria, September 2006.

Kari Pulli

New APIs for Mobile Graphics
SPIE Electronic Imaging 2006 Multimedia on Mobile Devices II, San Jose, USA, 2006.

Albert Huang, Kari Pulli, Larry Rudolph

Kimono: Kiosk-Mobile Phone Knowledge Sharing System (slides)
MUM 2005, pp. 142-149, Christchurch, New Zealand, December 2005.

Kari Pulli, Tomi Aarnio, Kimmo Roimela, Jani Vaarala

Designing Graphics Programming Interfaces for Mobile Devices.
IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, Volume 25, Issue 8, Nov.-Dec. 2005.

Kari J. Kangas, Mika Qvist, Kari Pulli

Synthetic content approach for benchmarking mobile 3D graphics (slides)
SIGRAD 2005, Lund, Sweden, November 2005.

Eugene Hsu, Kari Pulli, Jovan Popovic

Style Translation for Human Motion
SIGGRAPH 2005, pp. 1082-1089, Los Angeles, USA, August 2005.

Kari Pulli, Jani Vaarala, Ville Miettinen, Tomi Aarnio, Mark Callow

Developing Mobile 3D Applications With OpenGL ES and M3G
A course at SIGGRAPH 2005, Los Angeles, USA, August 2005.

Jiawen Chen, Michael I. Gordon, William Thies, Matthias Zwicker, Kari Pulli, Frédo Durand

A Reconfigurable Architecture for Load-Balanced Rendering ( slides )
Graphics Hardware 2005, pp. 71-80, Los Angeles, USA, July 2005.

Kari Pulli, Simo Piiroinen, Tom Duchamp, Werner Stuetzle

Projective Surface Matching of Colored 3D Scans ( slides, slides with speaker notes )
Fifth International Conference on3-D Digital Imaging and Modeling (3DIM'05), Ottawa, Canada, June 2005.

Kari Pulli

From a Researcher to a Manager: Transition and Learning Strategies
Executive MBA thesis, University of Oulu, Finland, 2001.

Marc Levoy, Kari Pulli, Brian Curless, Szymon Rusinkiewicz, David Koller, Lucas Pereira, Matt Ginzton,
Sean Anderson, James Davis, Jeremy Ginsberg, Jonathan Shade, Duane Fulk

The Digital Michelangelo Project: 3D Scanning of Large Statues
SIGGRAPH 2000, New Orleans, USA, July 2000.

Kari Pulli, Linda Shapiro

Surface Reconstruction and Display from Range and Color Data
Graphical Models and Image Processing, 62, pp. 165-201, 2000.
Basically a condensed version of the dissertation.

Kari Pulli

Multiview Registration for Large Data Sets
Second International Conference on 3D Digital Imaging and Modeling (3DIM'99), pp. 160-168, Ottawa, Canada, October 1999.

Kari Pulli, Habib Abi-Rached, Tom Duchamp, Linda G. Shapiro, and Werner Stuetzle

Acquisition and Visualization of Colored 3D Objects
International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR), pp. 11-15, Brisbane, Australia, August 1998.

Kari Pulli

Surface Reconstruction and Display from Range and Color Data
Ph.D. dissertation, University of Washington, 1997.

Kari Pulli, Michael Cohen, Tom Duchamp, Hugues Hoppe, John McDonald, Linda Shapiro, and Werner Stuetzle

Surface Modeling and Display from Range and Color Data
Keynote address at ICIAP'97, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 1310, Springer-Verlag, pp. 385-397, Florence, Italy, September 1997.

Kari Pulli, Michael Cohen, Tom Duchamp, Hugues Hoppe, Linda Shapiro, and Werner Stuetzle

View-based Rendering: Visualizing Real Objects from Scanned Range and Color Data
8th Eurographics Workshop on Rendering, St. Etienne, France, June 1997.
also Technical Report UW-CSE-97-04-01, University of Washington.

Kari Pulli, Tom Duchamp, Hugues Hoppe, John McDonald, Linda Shapiro, and Werner Stuetzle

Robust Meshes from Range Maps
Int. Conf. on Recent Advances in 3-D Digital Imaging and Modeling (3DIM'97), pp. 205-211, Ottawa, Canada, May 1997.

Kari Pulli and Michael Lounsbery

Hierarchical editing of subdivision surfaces
Technical Report UW-CSE-97-04-07, University of Washington.

Kari Pulli and Mark Segal

Fast rendering of subdivision surfaces
7th Eurographics Workshop on Rendering, pp. 61-70, 282, Porto, Portugal, June 1996
(Published by SpringerComputerScience as "Rendering Techniques '96")
also Technical Report UW-CSE-96-03-02, University of Washington
also Technical Sketch in SIGGRAPH '96 Visual Proceedings.

Kari Pulli and Tony DeRose

Effective Removal of Detail for a Multiresolution Viewer
Technical Sketch in SIGGRAPH '96 Visual Proceedings.

Kari Pulli and Linda Shapiro

Triplet-Based Object Recognition Using Synthetic and Real Probability Models
International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR), Wien, Austria, August 1996
a longer version is in
Kari Pulli
TRIBORS: A Triplet-Based Object Recognition System
Technical Report UW-CSE-95-01-01, University of Washington.

Hubert Jin, Tom Duchamp, Hugues Hoppe, John McDonald, Kari Pulli, and Werner Stuetzle

Surface reconstruction from misregistered data
SPIE vol. 2573, pp. 324-8, 1995.

Kari Pulli

Vision Methods for an Autonomous Machine Based on Range Imaging
Licentiate thesis, ACTA Universitatis Ouluensis, C 72, 1993.

Kari Pulli and Matti Pietikäinen

Range Image Segmentation Based on Decomposition of Surface Normals
Scandinavian Conference on Image Analysis (SCIA), Norway, 1993.

Jukka Riekki, Kari Pulli, and Juha Röning

A Goal Oriented and Reactive Autonomous Machine
Finnish Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 1992.

Kari Pulli

3D Graphics on the Multiprocessor System DAMP
Diploma thesis, University of Oulu and University of Paderborn, 1991.

• Samos IX - Keynote presentation: "Mobile Visual Computing"
• ISUVR 2009 - Keynote presentation: "Mobile Visual Computing"
• CGI 2008 - Keynote presentation: "Mobile Visual I/O"
• Web3D 2007 - Keynote presentation: "Mobile Visual I/O" Slides (pdf)[6MB]
  Abstract: Mobile devices are the new frontier in computation, internet connectivity, imaging, and computer graphics. For many people it provides their first computer of any kind. For example in China there are about 100 million PCs but over 400 million mobile phones. And the sales of camera phones far surpass the number of digital or any other types of consumer cameras. The visual capabilities of these devices have progressed at amazing pace, and today the high-end smart phones have large color screens, fast CPUs, even dedicated graphics HW acceleration. We will cover the short history of mobile 3D graphics, and introduce recent mobile graphics standards such as OpenGL ES, M3G, and OpenVG; these provide visual output. In recent years photography and graphics have begun to move closer to each other, we will also briefly discuss computational and contextual photography and augmented reality as fertile research topics; these provide visual input.
• SPIE Conference on Multimedia on Mobile Devices II - Keynote presentation: "New APIs for Mobile Graphics" Slides (pdf)[9MB]
  Abstract: Progress in mobile graphics technology during the last five years has been swift, and it has followed a similar path as on PCs: early proprietary software engines running on integer hardware paved the way to standards that provide a roadmap for graphics hardware acceleration. In this overview we cover five recent standards for 3D and 2D vector graphics for mobile devices. OpenGL ES is a low-level API for 3D graphics, meant for applications written in C or C++. M3G (JSR 184) is a high-level 3D API for mobile Java that can be implemented on top of OpenGL ES. Collada is a content interchange format and API that allows combining digital content creation tools and exporting the results to different run-time systems, including OpenGL ES and M3G. Two new 2D vector graphics APIs reflect the relations of OpenGL ES and M3G: OpenVG is a low-level API for C/C++ that can be used as a building block for a high-level mobile Java API JSR 226.
• Point-Based Graphics 2005 - Keynote presentation: "Ubiquitous 3D" Slides (pdf)[7.6MB]
  Abstract: A decade ago 3D graphics moved from dedicated and expensive engineering graphics workstations to normal PCs. Sophisticated graphics was now accessible to a much larger audience and developer pool than before. A similar revolution is happening right now as mobile devices such as PDAs and cellular phones have their own standard 3D APIs, high-quality color displays, and even hardware acceleration is starting to become available.
  This talk covered the graphics capabilities of modern mobile devices, their limitations, and graphics APIs designed for these devices. Also discussed, what is unique with mobile graphics compared to desktop graphics.
• Graphics Hardware 2004 - Keynote presentation: "Graphics Everywhere - Pixels in your Pocket" Slides (pdf)[6.3MB]
  Abstract: Mobile phones have been relatively simple appliances optimized for single use case: making and receiving phone calls. However, recent technological advances have produced mobile communication and information appliances, with decent general computational capacity, increasingly larger and higher quality displays, built-in wireless communication, open development platforms, and ubiquitous presence. This talk is going to cover the implications of these developments from the graphics point of view, the graphics use cases, mobile graphics standards, some limitations of the technology, software and hardware graphics engines, and the fast evolution of mobile graphics.
• Participated on Panels on Mobile Graphics at SIGGRAPH 2002, Web3D 2003, Imagina 2004, Computer Graphics International 2005.
• Other conference presentations (without a paper):
  • JavaOne 2004 (JSR-184, Mobile 3D Graphics for Java MIDP),
  • Assembly 2003 (Mobile Graphics APIs),
  • JavaOne 2003
  • MUM 2002 (Mobile Graphics),
  • Eurographics Italian Chapter Annual meeting 2002 (Mobile Graphics),
  • NIC 2001 (Mobile Graphics)
• Courses (at university):
  • Computer Graphics, Univ. Oulu
  • Mobile Computational Photography, Stanford
• Courses on mobile graphics APIs:
  • Khronos DevU
  • SIGGRAPH 2005
  • Eurographics 2006
  • SIGGRAPH 2007
  • Eurographics 2008