Kinectricks: Space-time Capture of Dynamic Objects using Hybrid Cameras

Tiberiu Popa - Concordia University

March 28, 2014, 1 p.m. - March 28, 2014, 2 p.m.

MC103


The acquisition of moving and deforming objects has lately received a lot of interest in computer graphics and vision due to its many applications in virtual and augmented reality, animation and special effects, 3D video and tele-presence. This is a challenging problem. Some objects such as skin or cloth exhibit very complex dynamic behaviour and fine geometric details difficult to capture. Another critical aspect in acquiring dynamic objects is maintaining temporal coherence between frames. Also due to occlusions the captured objects will often have missing geometry that needs to be reconstructed. In this talk I will present some of my work in space-time capture with several applications in modeling, deformation, novel view synthesis, telepresence and teleconferencing. At the core of most of our hardware setups there are one or more Kinect devices. This makes our setup inexpensive, but also raises a new set of challenges related to the low quality of the Kinect data. Professor Tiberiu Popa joined the department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Concordia University in August 2013. He was previously a Senior Researcher at ETH Zurich in the computer graphics lab and he completed my PhD at University of British Columbia. He has been doing research in Computer Graphics for over ten years and has supervised and mentored several Bachelor, Masters and PhD students. His research portfolio is diverse and includes geometric modeling, animation, 2D to 3D reconstruction, among other topics. One important focus of his research is spatio-temporal geometry acquisition (or 4D geometry acquisition) with vast applications in many disciplines ranging from games, engineering, e-commerce to medical.