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Spring 1998 Schedule

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This page is provided for historical and archival purposes only. While the seminar dates are correct, we offer no guarantee of informational accuracy or link validity. Contact information for the speakers, hosts and seminar committee are certainly out of date.

Color and Texture Metrics for Image Database Navigation

Carlo Tomasi
Department of Computer Science and Stanford Robotics Laboratory
Stanford University

Place and Time
Adamson Wing, Baker Hall
Refreshments 3:15 pm
Talk 3:30 pm

Abstract
[joint work with Yossi Rubner, and Leonidas J. Guibas]

A new distance between two distributions, called the Earth Mover's Distance (EMD), is introduced. The EMD reflects the minimal amount of work that must be performed to transform one distribution into the other by moving ``distribution mass'' around. This is a special case of the transportation problem from linear optimization, for which efficient algorithms are available. The EMD also allows for partial matching. When used to compare distributions that have the same overall mass, the EMD is a true metric, and has easy-to-compute lower bounds. In this talk I focus on applications to image databases, especially color and texture. The EMD can be used to exhibit the structure of color-distribution and texture spaces by means of Multi-Dimensional Scaling displays. I also propose a novel approach to the problem of navigating through a collection of color images, which leads to a new paradigm for image database search.

Speaker Biography
Carlo Tomasi holds a "Laurea" degree (1981) and a Doctorate (1987) in electrical communications from the University of Padova, Italy, a Master's degree in electrical and computer engineering (1984) from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and a PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University (1991). He was assistant professor at Cornell University between 1991 and 1994, and is currently assistant professor at Stanford University. His research interests are in computer vision, with emphasis on the interpretation of visual motion, stereo vision, image retrieval, and on representational issues in intermediate-level vision.

Speaker Appointments
For appointments, please contact the host, Sanjiv Singh, at ssingh+@cs.cmu.edu.