Nathan Funk

I have now completed a M.Sc. degree under Herb Yang in computer graphics and computer vision at the University of Alberta. This page contains documents related to my studies and research work which was on controlled lighting and shape reconstruction. Though I am not actively researching now, I intend to keep these documents available for others.

Publications

N. Funk, Y.-H. Yang, Using a Raster Display for Photometric Stereo,
Proc. Canadian Conf. on Computer and Robot Vision (CRV 2007),
pp. 201-207, Montreal, Canada, May 2007
Talk slides

Thesis

Using a Raster Display Device for Controlled Illumination

Computer vision attempts to find an abstract representation of a scene from images. The ability to control the lighting of the scene simplifies various tasks in the field. This thesis develops a new controlled lighting apparatus which uses a raster display device as a light source. The setup has the advantage over other alternatives in that it is relatively inexpensive and uses commonly available components.

Two applications are examined. The first is shape reconstruction using photometric stereo. Experiments on synthetic and real images demonstrate how the depth map of an object can be recovered using only a camera and an LCD display. The second application studied is the experimental evaluation of lighting estimation techniques. The use of the setup for this purpose is demonstrated with the evaluation of Singh & Ahuja's method. Further development of the core idea of this thesis is expected to benefit a range of applications.

Update April 16, 2001: Grant Schindler from the Georgia Institute of Technology has developed an iPhone app which can reconstruct faces and small objects using a similar photometric stereo approach.

Colleagues

Herb Yang (Univ. of Alberta)
Martin Jaegersand (Univ. of Alberta)
Dana Cobzas (Univ. of Alberta)
Neil Birkbeck (Univ. of Alberta)
Yannick Francken (Univ. Hasselt)

Course Projects and Assignments

	CMPT 605 Individual Studies 1. Single Light Source Detection Methods 2. Multiple Light Source Detection Methods (Part 1) 3. Multiple Light Source Detection Methods (Part 2) 4. Shape from Shading Papers 5. Papers on Relighting
	Implementation of a Soft-Shadow Algorithm CMPT 610 Image and Motion Synthesis report , video (20MB .avi, encoded with DivX)
	Implementation of a Visual Attention Model CMPT 616 The Brain report , presentation, detailed presentation
	A Survey of Light Source Detection Methods CMPT 603 Teaching and Research Methods report , presentation
	Implementation of the Zhang & Yang Light Source Detection Method CMPT 615 3-Dimensional Computer Vision report
	A Study of the Kalman Filter applied to Visual Tracking CMPUT 652 Probabilistic Methods in AI report