Guest Speaker

OBJECT TRACKING

Dr. Mubarak Shah
Computer Vision Lab
School of Computer Science
University of Central Florida

Weds., Oct. 13th
3:30pm, 480 Dreese Labs
All interested parties are invited.
Refreshments will be served immediately preceding the talk.

Abstract:
Object tracking is an important task within the area of computer vision. The proliferation of high powered computers and the increasing need for automated surveillance systems have generated a great deal of interest in object tracking algorithms. Tracking can be defined as the problem of estimating the trajectory of an object as the object moves around a scene. Simply stated, we want to know where the object is in the image at each instant in time. Numerous approaches for object tracking have been proposed. These primarily differ from each other based on the way they tackle the following questions: Which object representation is suitable for tracking? Which image features should be used? How should the motion, the appearance and the shape of the object be modeled? The answers to these questions depend on the context/environment in which the tracking is being performed, and the end use for which the tracking information is being sought.

Our Computer Vision group at University of Central Florida has been involved in research related to several aspects of object tracking. We have developed efficient algorithms for tracking in imagery acquired by a fixed camera, a moving camera, multiple fixed overlapping and non-overlapping cameras, and multiple overlapping moving cameras. In this talk I will present an overview of our work in this area.

Dr. Mubarak Shah, a professor of Computer Science, and the founding director of the Computer Vision Laboratory at University of Central Florida (UCF), is a well known researcher in computer vision. He is a co-author of two books Video Registration (2003) and Motion-Based Recognition (1997), both by Kluwer Academic Publishers. He has supervised several Ph.D., M.S., and B.S. students to completion, and is currently directing twenty Ph.D. and several B.S. students. He has published close to one hundred fifty papers in leading journals and conferences on topics including activity and gesture recognition, violence detection, event ontology, object tracking (fixed camera, moving camera, multiple overlapping and non-overlapping cameras), video segmentation, story and scene segmentation, view morphing, ATR, wide-baseline matching, and video registration. . Dr. Shah is a fellow of IEEE, was an IEEE Distinguished Visitor speaker for 1997-2000, and is often invited to present seminars, tutorials and invited talks all over the world. He received the Harris Corporation Engineering Achievement Award in 1999, the TOKTEN awards from UNDP in 1995, 1997, and 2000; Teaching Incentive Program award in 1995 and 2003, Research Incentive Award in 2003, and IEEE Outstanding Engineering Educator Award in 1997. He is an editor of international book series on “Video Computing”; editor in chief of Machine Vision and Applications journal, and an associate editor Pattern Recognition journal. He was an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on PAMI, and a guest editor of the special issue of International Journal of Computer Vision on Video Computing.

Host: Jim Davis