【Academic report】——Depth perception and depth technology

Title: Depth perception and depth technology

Time: Mar.24   10:00 a.m.

Location: 307B

Reporter: Tammam Tillo

【Abstract】
Depth perception is the visual ability to perceive the world in three dimensions (3D) and the distance of an object by using variety of depth cues. Currently there are several technologies that allow us to measure objects’ distances in the scene, each one having its advantages and disadvantages. Although depth-cameras began to emerge around 2000, however, their popularity probably came with Kinect depth-camera from Microsoft, which is now paving the way for variety of new applications. Currently several problems are being addressed in the research community by using depth information, and examples of applications that could benefit from this type of information are: gesture-based control systems, image segmentation and object identification, Free viewpoint TeleVision (FTV) where the receiver could synthesize the intermediate viewpoints, and walk-aider devices for visually impaired peoples, and many others. This talk will start by reviewing human-depth-perception cues, then we will present some common depth-map acquisition devices and their applications, finally we will present some of our achievements in this field.
 
【Introduction】
Tammam Tillo received the Engineer Diploma in electrical engineering from the University of Damascus, Syria, in 1994, and the Ph.D. degree in electronics and communication engineering from Politecnico di Torino, Italy, in 2005. In 2004, he served as a Visiting Researcher at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, and from 2005 to 2008, he worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Image Processing Lab of Politecnico di Torino. For few months he was Invited Research Professor at the Digital Media Lab, SungKyunKwan University, Republic of Korea, before joining Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (XJTLU), China, in 2008. He was promoted to full professor in 2012. From 2010 to 2013 he was the Head of the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at XJTLU University, and was the Acting Head of the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering from 2012 to 2013. He serves as an expert evaluator for several national-level research programs. His research interests are in the areas of robust transmission of multimedia data, image and video compression, and hyperspectral image compression.