Seminar

MIT's Golden Age of Vision

Winter Term 2016 / 2017


(Main) Seminar: MIT's Golden Age of Vision

Sarah Andris, Prof. Joachim Weickert

Winter Term 2016

(Main) Seminar (2 h)

Notice for bachelor/master students of mathematics: This is a »Hauptseminar« in the sense of these study programs.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Photo: J. Weickert

Important DatesDescriptionRegistrationRequirementsIntroductory MeetingOverview of Topics



Introductory meeting (mandatory):
The introductory meeting will take place on Friday, July 29, 2016, 2:15 p.m., in E1.7, Room 4.10.
In this meeting, we will assign the topics to the participants. Attendance is mandatory for all participants. Do not forget to register first (see below).

Regular meetings during the winter term 2016:
Wednesday, 4:15 p.m., in Building E1.7, Room 4.10


Contents: In the mid 1980s, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was the birthplace of many fundamental concepts in image processing, computer vision, and cognitive sciences. Graduates and researchers in that period include Edward Adelson, Peter Burt, John Canny, Bill Freeman, Ellen Hildreth, Berthold Horn, David Marr, Tomaso Poggio, Demetri Terzopoulos, Andy Witkin, and Alan Yuille. Their ideas have been very influential over three decades. In our seminar we are going to study a number of their key papers and discuss their impact on today's research. In particular, we will cover scale-space analysis, regularisation theory, edge detection, image pyramids and multigrid concepts, data compression, optic flow, shape-from-shading, and surface reconstruction.

Prerequisites: The seminar is for advanced bachelor or master students in Visual Computing, Mathematics, or Computer Science. Basic mathematical knowledge (e.g. Mathematik für Informatiker I-III) and some knowledge in image processing and computer vision is required.

Language: All papers are written in English, and English is the language of presentation.


There are no more places left. The registration is closed.


Regular attendance: You must attend all seminar meetings, except for provable important reasons (medical certificate).

Talk: Talk duration is 30 min, plus 15 min for discussion. Please do not deviate from this time schedule.
You may give a presentation using a data projector, overhead projector or blackboard, or mix these media appropriately. Your presentation must be delivered in English. Your slides and your write-up, too, have to be in English.

Write-up: The write-up has to be handed in three weeks after the lecture period ends. The deadline is March 10, 23:59. The write-up should summarise your talk, about 5 pages per speaker will be adequate in most cases. Electronic submission is preferred. File format for electronic submissions is PDF – text processor files (like .doc) are not acceptable. Do not forget to hand in your writeup: Participants who do not submit a writeup cannot obtain the certificate for the seminar.

Plagiarism: Adhere to the standards of scientific referencing and avoid plagiarism: Quotations and copied material (such as images) must be clearly marked as such, and a bibliography is required. Otherwise the seminar counts as failed.

Mandatory consultation: Talk preparation has to be presented to your seminar supervisor no later than one week before the talk is given. It is your responsibility to approach us timely and make your appointment.

No-shows: No-shows are unfair to your fellow students: Some talks are based on previous talks, and your seminar place might have prevented the participation of another student. Thus, in case you do not appear to your scheduled talk (except for reasons beyond your control), we reserve the right to exclude you from future seminars of our group.

Participation in discussions: The discussions after the presentations are a vital part of this seminar. This means that the audience (i.e. all paricipants) poses questions and tries to find positive and negative aspects of the proposed idea. This participation is part of your final grade.

Being in time: To avoid disturbing or interrupting the speaker, all participants have to be in the seminar room in time. Participants that turn out to be regularly late must expect a negative influence on their grade.


Here you will find the slides from the introductory meeting. They will contain important information for preparing a good talk.


We will discuss the following papers. If your registration was successful, the password will be sent to you before the first meeting.


No.   Date   Advisor Speaker Paper
1 23.11. Weickert Moustafa Abouenein
Slides
D. Marr, E. Hildreth:
Theory of edge detection.
2 23.11. Andris Rosita Andrade
Slides
A. P. Witkin:
Scale-space filtering.
3 30.11. Weickert Kareem Ergawy
Slides
A. L Yuille, T. A Poggio:
Scaling theorems for zero crossings.
4 30.11. Andris Chitra Singh
Slides
J. Canny:
A computational approach to edge detection.
5 07.12. Weickert Pallavi Majumder
Slides
W. M. Wells III:
Efficient synthesis of Gaussian filters by cascaded uniform filters.
6 14.12. Andris Marc Habermann
Slides
U. Y. Desai, M. M. Mizuki, I. Masaki, B. K. P. Horn:
Edge and mean based image compression.
7 14.12. Weickert Sheheryar Mehmood
Slides
P. J. Burt, E. H. Adelson:
The Laplacian pyramid as a compact image code.
8 04.01. Weickert Ahmed Abbas
Slides
W. T. Freeman, E. H. Adelson:
The design and use of steerable filters.
9 11.01. Andris Damaris Gatzsche
Slides
D. Terzopoulos:
Image analysis using multigrid relaxation methods.
10 11.01. Andris Philipp Schneider
Slides
J. L. Marroquin:
Deterministic interactive particle models for image processing and computer graphics.
11 11.01. Weickert Carlos Fernandez de Tejada
Slides
M. Kass, A. Witkin, D. Terzopoulos:
Snakes: Active contour models.
12 18.01. Andris Jillian Sarah Clark
Slides
D. Geiger, A. Yuille:
A common framework for image segmentation.
13 18.01. Andris Xintian Shi
Slides
E. C. Hildreth:
Computations underlying the measurement of visual motion.
14 25.01. Weickert Mohammad Shafiei
Slides
K. Ikeuchi, B. K. P. Horn:
Numerical shape from shading and occluding boundaries.
15 25.01. Andris Mohsen Mansouryar
Slides
W. E. L. Grimson:
An implementation of a computational theory of visual surface interpolation.


MIA Group
©2001-2023
The author is not
responsible for
the content of
external pages.

Imprint - Data protection