Processing and Visualizing Sparsely Scanned Outdoor Scenes

Speaker:	Dr. Baoquan Chen
		Computer Science and Engineering Department
		University of Minnesota

Title:		"Processing and Visualizing Sparsely Scanned
		 Outdoor Scenes"

Date:		Thursday, 9 November 2006

Time:		4:00pm - 5:00pm

Venue:		Room 4480 (via lift nos. 25/26)
		HKUST

Abstract:

Capturing real-world scenes is both an interesting and a challenging task in
computer graphics. To offer unconstrained navigation of the scenes, 3D
representations are first needed. Advancement in laser scanning technology
is making 3D acquisition feasible for large outdoor objects. However, thus
scanned data demonstrate several challenging properties such as
incompleteness (missing geometry), complexity (e.g., geometry of plants),
inaccuracy (moving objects), and large data size.
These properties raise unprecedented challenges for existing methods that
deal with small to medium range scans all the way from scan registration to
geometry representation and rendering. In this talk, I will describe
solutions to handling long range outdoor scans. The underlying approaches
fall into two directions: the first one is artistic abstraction and
depiction directly from point-based representation; and the second one is
knowledge-based full geometry construction from sparse scans.


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Biography:

Baoquan Chen is an assistant professor of Computer Science and Engineering
at the University of Minnesota at Twin Cities. His research interests
generally lie in computer graphics and visualization, focusing specifically
on outdoor scene acquisition, illustrative rendering and visualization and
interactive techniques. Chen received an MS in Electronic Engineering from
Tsinghua University, Beijing (1994), and a second MS (1997) and then PhD
(1999) in Computer Science from the State University of New York at Stony
Brook. Chen is the recipient of the Microsoft Innovation Excellence Program
2002, the NSF CAREER award 2003, McKnight Land-Grant Professorship at the
University of Minnesota 2004-2006, the Best Paper award in IEEE
Visualization 2005, and the IEEE Outstanding Service Award 2006. He is an
invited keynote speaker at the Second International Symposium on Plant
Growth Modeling, Simulation, Visualization and Applications 2006. He is the
program co-chair of IEEE Visualization 2004, general co-chair of IEEE
Visualization 2005 and 2006 and papers co-chair of Symposium on Point-based
Graphics 2006 and 2007. He is a senior member of IEEE.