Upcoming Talk
Wed, May 16, 2012
12-1pm, 182 George St, Room 110
Sponsored by
Division of Applied Mathematics & Center for Vision
Lessons from Photographing and Identifying the
World's Plant Species
Professor
Department of Computer Science
Columbia University
Columbia University, the University of Maryland, and the
Smithsonian Institution are working on visual
recognition software to help identify species from
photographs. I will discuss our work on developing
Leafsnap -- the first in a series of electronic field guides.
As part of this work, we have completed photographing
close to one third of the world's plant species and have
begun capturing beautiful high-resolution images of live
specimens. Our work has led us in new research
directions for the visual recognition of human faces, dog
breeds, and bird species, including the adoption of
centuries-old techniques from taxonomy for the process
of labeling images with visual attributes and object
parts. In particular, I will show that it is possible to
automatically recognize a wide range of visual attributes
and parts in images and use them in numerous
applications of computer vision.
