PhD Research

Introduction

"Vision is a process that produces from images of the external world a description that is useful to the viewer and not cluttered with irrelevant information." [Marr 1982]

As proposed by Marr, one of the subject's early pioneers, computer vision addresses the problem of inferring useful information from images and videos of the world around us. A statement such as this gives rise to a plethora of questions as we attempt to delve deeper into the aims and motivations of the study of vision. Principally among these might be the question of what do we mean by useful information. Over the intervening years researchers have proposed a variety of tasks that a vision system, whether human or machine, might wish to perform and each task has corresponding requirements on particular pieces of information that may prove useful. At the broadest level these tasks include:

• Recovering the stucture of the observed scene. This includes forming an understanding of the 3D world from visual observations, including an analysis of its physical shape and the motions of the viewer and the scene.
• Interpreting the contents of the observed scene. This includes the tasks of discovering the presence of objects and identifying them in a hierarchy, i.e. from classes of object down to specific instances.

The first of these tasks forms the area of interest for my research, in particular the goal of understanding and recovering the shape of the 3D world from visual information.

References

[Marr 1982]   D. Marr.   Vision.   W.H.Freeman & Co., 1982.