Events

CS Colloquium: Shedding Light on 3D Cameras

Speaker: Mohit Gupta

Location: 60 Fifth Avenue, Room 150

Date: Friday, October 28, 2022

The advent (and commoditization) of low-cost 3D cameras is
revolutionizing many application domains, including robotics,
autonomous navigation, human computer interfaces, and recently even
consumer devices such as cell-phones. Most modern 3D cameras (e.g.,
LiDAR) are _active_; they consist of a light source that emits coded
light into the scene, i.e., its intensity is modulated over space,
and/or time. The performance of these cameras is determined by their
illumination coding functions.

I will talk about our work on developing a coding theory of active 3D
cameras. This theory, for the first time, abstracts several seemingly
different 3D camera designs into a common, geometrically intuitive
space. Based on this theory, we design novel 3D cameras that achieve
up to an order of magnitude higher performance as compared to the
current state-of-the art. I will also briefly talk about our work
toward developing `All-Weather’ 3D cameras that can operate in
extreme real-world conditions, including outdoors (e.g., a robot
navigating outdoors in bright sunlight and poor weather), under
multi-camera interference (e.g., multiple robots navigating in a
shared space such as a warehouse), and handle optically challenging
objects such as shiny metal (e.g., for an industrial robot sorting
machine parts).