Abstract: Visual perception is indispensable in numerous applications such as autonomous vehicles. Today's visual perception algorithms are often developed under a closed-world paradigm (e.g., training machine-learned models over curated datasets), which assumes the data distribution and categorical labels are fixed a priori. This assumption is unrealistic in the real open world, which contains situations that are dynamic and unpredictable. As a result, closed-world visual perception systems appear to be brittle in the open-world. For example, autonomous vehicles with such systems could fail to recognize a never-before-seen overturned truck and crash into it. We are motivated to ask how to (1) detect all the object instances in the image, and (2) recognize the unknowns. In this talk, I will present my solutions and their applications in autonomous driving and natural science. I will also introduce more research topics in the direction of Open-World Visual Perception.
Bio: Shu Kong is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University, supervised by Prof. Deva Ramanan. He earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of California-Irvine, advised by Prof. Charless Fowlkes. His research interests span computer vision and machine learning, and their applications to autonomous vehicles and natural science. His current research focuses on Open-World Visual Perception. His recent paper on this topic received Best Paper / Marr Prize Honorable Mention at ICCV 2021. He regularly serves on the program committee in major conferences of computer vision and machine learning. He also serves as the lead organizer of workshops on Open-World Visual Perception at CVPR 2021 and 2022. His latest interdisciplinary research includes building a high-throughput pollen analysis system, which was featured by the National Science Foundation as that "opens a new era of fossil pollen research".
This seminar will be streaming via Zoom at the link above but requires a passcode. To obtain the passcode for this event, please see the announcements on the college email lists or contact us.