The phenomenon of visual grouping was first highlighted by the Gestalt school of visual perception led by Max Wertheimer, nearly a century ago. In computational vision, this ability has been studied as "image segmentation," the partitioning of an image (or video stream) into sets of pixels that correspond to "objects" or parts of objects. This process is based on bottom-up cues such as similarity of pixel brightness, color, texture and motion, as well as top-xdown input derived from familiar object categories such as faces. In this talk, I will describe the research conducted in my group over the last ten years aimed at developing a scientific understanding of grouping, both in the context of human perception and for computer vision. At a philosophical level, the techniques that we have developed go some way towards closing the much-cited "semantic gap" between pixels and perception.

Presenter Bio

Jitendra Malik, University of California, Berkeley

Jitendra Malik was born in Mathura, India in 1960. He received the B.Tech degree in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur in 1980 and the PhD degree in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1985. In January 1986, he joined the university of California at Berkeley, where he is currently the Arthur J. Chick Professor in the Computer Science Division, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS). He is also on the faculty of the Cognitive Science and Vision Science groups. During 2002-2004 he served as the Chair of the Computer Science Division and during 2004-2006 as the Department Chair of EECS. He serves on the advisory board of Microsoft Research India, and on the Governing Body of IIIT Bangalore. He has authored or co-authored more than a hundred and fifty research papers, and graduated twenty-five PhD students who occupy prominent places in academia and industry. He received the gold medal for the best graduating student in Electrical Engineering from IIT Kanpur in 1980, a Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1989, and the Rosenbaum fellowship for the Computer Vision Programme at the Newton Institute of Mathematical Sciences, University of Cambridge in 1993. At UC Berkeley, he was selected for the Diane S. McEntyre Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2000, a Miller Research Professorship in 2001, and appointed to be the Arthur J. Chick Professor in 2002. He received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from IIT Kanpur in 2008. He was awarded the Longuet-Higgins Prize for a contribution that has stood the test of time twice, in 2007 and in 2008. He is a fellow of the IEEE.