Becoming friends with pixels through intermediate representations

Abstract:

Manipulation of natural images for tasks like object insertion, out-painting or creating animations is extremely difficult if we operate purely in the pixel domain. Dr Kuldeep Kulkarni talked about the advantages of manipulating visual data by directly expressing them in intermediate representations and manipulating them instead of the pixels. Specifically, the focus was on his recent works with image out-painting and animating still images as target applications. He first talked about a semantically-aware novel paradigm to perform image extrapolation that enables the addition of new object instances. Expressing the images in semantic label space allows us to complete the existing objects more effectively and add completely new objects that otherwise are very difficult when working in the pixel domain. Dr. Kulkarni also discussed methods he developed to exploit intermediate representations like optical flow and surface normal maps to generate cinema graphs depicting the animation of fluid elements and human clothing.