Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science

Distinguished Lecturer Series 2011

& Dallas Chapter of IEEE Signal Processing Society

Professor Jake Aggarwal

University of Texas at Austin

Computer Recognition of Human Activities, Objects and their Interactions

Computer Vision has graduated from a research tool in early 1960s to a mature discipline today. The developments in cameras, computers and memory have contributed in part to this maturing of computer vision. Namely, there is an explosive growth in the number of cameras in public places, the speed of computers has increased significantly and the price of memory has spectacularly decreased. The word camera may be used in a very broad sense since the imaging modalities range from the usual cameras imaging a visual intensity image to thermal image and laser range image. In addition, several applications of computer vision technology are contributing to the solution of a diverse set of societal problems.

At The University of Texas at Austin, we are pursuing a number of projects on human activity understanding and face/emotion recognition. Professor Aggarwal will present his research on modeling and recognition of actions and interactions, and human and object interactions. The object may be a piece of luggage, a car or an unmovable object like a fence. The applications considered include monitoring of: human activities in public places, identification of abandoned baggage and face and emotion recognition. The issues considered in these problems will illustrate the richness of ideas involved and the difficulties associated with understanding human activities. Application of the above research to monitoring and surveillance will be discussed together with actual examples and their solutions.

Date:

Friday, April 15, 2011

Time:

11:00 a.m.

Place:

ECSS 2.102

TI Auditorium Engineering and Computer Science Complex, UTD Campus J. K. (Jake) Aggarwal

has served on the faculty of The University of Texas at Austin College of Engineering and is currently a Cullen Trust Endowed Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Director of the Computer and Vision Research Center. His research interests include computer vision, pattern recognition and image processing focusing on human motion. A Fellow of IEEE (1976), IAPR (1998) and AAAS (2005), he received the Senior Research Award of the American Society of Engineering Education in 1992, the 1996 Technical Achievement Award of the IEEE Computer Society and the Graduate Teaching Award at The University of Texas at Austin in 1992. More recently, he is the recipient of the 2004 K S FU prize of the International Association for Pattern Recognition, the 2005 Kirchmayer Graduate Teaching Award of the IEEE and the 2007 Okawa Prize of the Okawa Foundation of Japan. He is a Life Fellow of IEEE and Golden Core member of IEEE Computer Society.

He has authored or edited a number of books, chapters, proceedings of conferences, and papers.

Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science

The University of Texas at Dallas 800 W. Campbell Road Richardson, TX 75080-3021 For more information: Phone: 972-883-2974 www.utdallas.edu