Courses

This course covers the fundamentals of vision cameras and other sensors - how they function, how they are built, and how to use them effectively. The course presents a journey through the fascinating five hundered year history of "camera-making" from the early 1500's "camera obscura" through the advent of film and lenses, to today's mirror-based and solid state devices (CCD, CMOS). The course includes a significant hands-on component where students learn how to use the sensors and understand, model and deal with the uncertainty (noise) in their measurements. While the first half of the course deals with conventional "single viewpoint" or "perspective" cameras, the second half of the course covers much more recent "multi-viewpoint" or "multi-perspective" cameras that includes a host of lenses and mirrors.

Everyday we observe an extraordinary array of light and color phenomena around us, ranging from the dazzling effects of the atmosphere, the complex appearances of surfaces and materials and underwater scenarios. For a long time, artists, scientists and photographers have been fascinated by these effects, and have focused their attention on capturing and understanding these phenomena. In this course, we take a computational approach to modeling and analyzing these phenomena, which we collectively call as "visual appearance". The first half of the course focuses on the physical fundamentals of visual appearance, while the second half of the course focuses on algorithms and applications in a variety of fields such as computer vision, graphics and remote sensing and technologies such as underwater and aerial imaging. This course unifies concepts usually learnt in physical sciences and their application in imaging sciences. The course will also include a photography competition in addition to analytical and practical assignments.

Undergraduate Computer Vision focuses on cameras and their optics, biological cameras, image processing, surface reflection, lightness and perception, 3D from shading, binocular stereo, optical flow, range scanning and structured light, and more.

This course provides a comprehensive introduction to computer graphics modeling, animation, and rendering. Topics covered include basic image processing, geometric transformations, geometric modeling of curves and surfaces, animation, 3-D viewing, visibility algorithms, shading, and ray tracing. The programming assignments in this course will be written in C++ and require knowledge of mathematics involving matrices, vectors, etc. Therefore successful completion of the following courses is required: 15-213/18-243 [Introduction to Computer Systems] and either 18-202 [Mathematical Foundations of Electrical Engineering] or both 21-241 [Matrix Algebra], and 21-259 [Calculus in Three Dimensions].