I work with both graduate and undergraduate students on a variety of projects. If you are interested in working with me as either a graduate student or as an undergraduate doing independent study, then you should read my rules before getting in touch with me.

Doctoral Students

Ross Sowell - Fitting surfaces to MRI data

Currently, fitting smooth, parameterized models to specific anatomy elements in MRI data is a time-consuming problem involving a great deal of manual intervention. Given that we know (roughly) the shape of the surface we're looking for, can we reduce (or eliminate) the manual component?

The first step in solving this problem is creating an interactive editor in which we can visualize both the MRI data and the fitted surface, and edit the latter.

Reynold Bailey - Perception-based image editing

Rennie has done an in-depth study of how we perceive color and luminance. He is working on image-editing techniques that use this information to create more intuitive, perception-based changes.

Rob Glaubius - Surface fitting using manifolds

Rob is actually Bill Smart's student working on reinforcement learning for robots using manifolds. Fitting value functions to sample data is a (much harder) version of surface fitting. Rob is applying chart placement approaches to the manifold surface fitting problem.

Ly Phan - Sketching reaction diffusion textures

Procedural textures are great because they can produce as much texture as you need. Unfortunately, they are usually specified by a multitude of parameters, and it takes some amount of effort to get a desired effect. Ly has developed a sketching interface for Reaction-diffusion textures which greatly simplifies the specification process.

Ly has now joined the PhD program and is working on using isomap to classify animation data.

Distributed Mentor program

Kristi Blumenberg - Genome visualization: The amount of available genome data is growing exponentially. In this project, Kristi has created a modified fish-eye warp suitable for viewing bacteria genomes. Joint with Jeremy Buhler.
Shanna Sampson - Robot-human interaction: Shanna described and implemented a robot study that looked at human reaction to robots in the environment.
Hiba Al-Zahawi - Perception-based filters: Hiba spent the summer implementing perception-based filters and creating models in Radiance for testing out these filters. She is continuing on as a master's student at the University of Utah

The above students spent the summer in my lab as part of the Computing Research Association's Distributed mentor program.

Alumni

Amy Hawkins - Camera control and surface modeling

Camera Interpolation: Amy applied Linear matrix interpolation to camera interpolation. This involved re-writing the projection matrix into a more suitable form, looking at three types of interpolation (piece-wise linear, smooth approximating and smooth interpolating) and altering the interpolation when the rotation is too big.

Surface parameterization: There are several theoretical papers out there for cutting n-holed tori open along their generator lines (most using a version of minimum spanning tree). Actually implementing these algorithms on real meshes, then using them to create a parameterization of the hyperbolic disk is a challenging problem.

Nisha Sudarsanam - Non-linear projections and camera control

Nisha started off looking at non-linear projection systems, and quickly discovered that defining one camera was difficult, much less multiple ones. This led to the CubeWidget, a screen-based interactive widget for camera control. The CubeWidget both simplifies the IBar and provides better feedback for novice users. She is now looking at screen-space widgets for specific non-linear projections. The first of these supports curvi-linear perspective, where vanishing lines form sinusoids instead of straight lines.

Timothy D. Gatzke - Surface comparison

Timothy has developed metrics for comparing and describing local surface shape. He is now extending this work to surface feature identification (is this shape a peak? a ridge?) and mutually consistent parameterizations of similar, but not identical, shapes. He also works full time at Boeing (!) and we expect him to graduate in August and get back to a normal (?) life.

Mark Schroering - 3D input device

Mark developed a 3D sketching device based on a (tracked) piece of paper and a camera.

Raquel Bujans - Mesh editing

Raquel applied both widget-based and sketch-based techniques to the problem of mesh editing.

Bill Niebridge - GPU techniques

Bill took a continuous, overlapping spherical parameterization technique and ported it to the GPU as an alternative to cube mapping. Since the mapping is continuous and overlapping, it is an ideal representation for capturing and storing environment maps.

Andrew Schoewe - GPU Genetic textures

Andrew implemented genetic textures in the GPU.

Martin Hassett - Implicit surface editing

Martin is now at Boeing.

Nicholas Haddad - Sound

Nick applied texture synthesis approaches to sound.

Ying Huang - Texture synthesis

Ying looked at data capture for view-dependent texture synthesis.

Zachary Byers - Lewis the robotic photographer

Zach was one of the primary architects of the Lewis robotic photographer system. He is now married and working at Southwestern Bell.

Michael Dixon - Lewis the robotic photographer

Michael was the other architect of the Lewis project; he now works in our lab.

Christopher Kulla - Texturing

Chris looked at ways to generate texture variation to represent shading. His primary love is rendering; he is the Source forge lead on Sunflow and is the research department for Reel Fx..

Tim Blakeley - Finger-tip UI

Tim is experimenting with a 3D tracker-based system for 3D user-interfaces. This is a very low-end system that tracks just the finger tips. Tim also has done a lot of GPU implementation, including the non-linear projection code.

Nathan Dudley - Abstraction and realism

Artists often depict texturally complicated objects using a mix of abstraction and realism. For example, the basic tree shape is outlined in shaded blobs, then detail added in where necessary. Nathan has adopted this approach for rendering trees generated by L-Studio.

Leon Barrett - Non-linear cameras

Leon is the guy who developed the four-point camera model, which has now been used for both camera interpolation and non-linear projection. He is now a graduate student at UC Berkeley

Timothy Lin - 3D Painting

Timothy wrote a first draft of a 3D painting system that models the complex interactions of physical paint (with depth).

Page written by Cindy Grimm.