Visualizing the Passage of Time with Video Temporal Pyramids.

What can we learn about a scene by watching it for months or years? A video recorded over a long timespan will depict interesting phenomena at multiple timescales, but identifying and viewing them presents a challenge. The video is too long to watch in full, and some things are too slow to experience in real-time, such as glacial retreat or the gradual shift from summer to fall. Timelapse videography is a common approach to summarizing long videos and visualizing slow timescales.

Scene Summarization via Motion Normalization.

When observing the visual world, temporal phenomena are ubiquitous: people walk, cars drive, rivers flow, clouds drift, and shadows elongate. Some of these, like water splashing and cloud motion, occur over time intervals that are either too short or too long for humans to easily observe. High-speed and timelapse videos provide a popular and compelling way to visualize these phenomena, but many real-world scenes exhibit motions occurring at a variety of rates.

Photometric Ambient Occlusion for Intrinsic Image Decomposition.

We present a method for computing ambient occlusion (AO) for a stack of images of a Lambertian scene from a fixed viewpoint. Ambient occlusion, a concept common in computer graphics, characterizes the local visibility at a point: it approximates how much light can reach that point from different directions without getting blocked by other geometry. While AO has received surprisingly little attention in vision, we show that it can be approximated using simple, per-pixel statistics over image stacks, based on a simplified image formation model.

Static compressive tracking.

This paper presents the Static Computational Optical Undersampled Tracker (SCOUT), an architecture for compressive motion tracking systems. The architecture uses compressive sensing techniques to track moving targets at significantly higher resolution than the detector array, allowing for low cost, low weight design and a significant reduction in data storage and bandwidth requirements. Using two amplitude masks and a standard focal plane array, the system captures many projections simultaneously, avoiding the need for time-sequential measurements of a single scene.