Steve Seitz: Using 2D images to create 3D models of historic places

Collectively, we take upwards of a trillion photos each year. These images together comprise a nearly complete visual record of the world's people, places, things and events. However, this record is massively disorganized, unlabeled, and untapped. Steve Seitz explores ways of transforming this massive, unorganized photo collection into reconstructions and visualizations of the world's sites, cities, and people. He is interested in problems in computer vision and computer graphics, and his current research focuses on 3D modeling and visualization from large photo collections.

Steve Seitz is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. He also directs an imaging group at Google's Seattle office. He received his B.A. in computer science and mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley in 1991 and his Ph.D. in computer sciences at the University of Wisconsin in 1997. Following his doctoral work, he spent one year visiting the Vision Technology Group at Microsoft Research and the subsequent two years as an Assistant Professor in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He joined the faculty at the University of Washington in July 2000. He was twice awarded the David Marr Prize for the best paper at the International Conference of Computer Vision, and he has received an NSF Career Award, and ONR Young Investigator Award, and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and is an IEEE Fellow. His work on Photo Tourism (joint with Noah Snavely and Rick Szeliski) formed the basis of Microsoft's Photosynth technology.

Steve Seitz will present a plenary talk on 6 February 2013 at the SPIE/IS&T Electronic Imaging Symposium in Burlingame, California.