TITLE: Jigsaw: the unsupervised construction of spatial representations

PRESENTER: Barry Drake

AFFILIATION: AI Group, CS&E, UNSW

DATE: Friday, 1st December 2000 TIME: 12:00 - 13:00

PLACE: Meeting Room 1 Ground Floor Samuels Building

* All Welcome *

Enter through gate 11 in Botany Street for parking

For more information on the location see URL http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~aishare/finding/

ABSTRACT:

When building robots that require hand-eye coordination, it is known that given an accurately calibrated visual system, it is possible to automatically calibrate the manipulators. Conversely, the visual system can be automatically calibrated when the motor system is accurately calibrated. However, when we consider a young child, it manages to develop hand-eye coordination from an initially decalibrated vision and motor system. How is this possible?

This seminar will present an algorithm, JIGSAW, which uses a seemingly ubiquitous and deep property of the world, spatial redundancy, to automatically calibrate machine vision systems. JIGSAW can take a set of sensors and infer the topology of the set based purely on the signals delivered by the sensors. The algorithm may explain how the developing child organises its visual system from a random start - leading to retinotopic maps in the brain. It provides a mechanism for automatic and continuous self-calibrating robotic vision. And it hints at other, broader applications in the fields of data mining and remote sensing.

BIOGRAPHY OF SPEAKER:

Barry graduated BSc (Computer Science) 1st class Hons, UTS. He has spent 9 years in the Royal Australian Navy of which over 6 were in the Submarine Squadron. He also worked 6 years with SBS, Telstra then IBM. Barry is currently in his 3rd year of a PhD @ CSE UNSW. He enjoys rock climbing, bush walking abseiling and canyoning and does commercial guiding for Outland Expeditions.

Seminar Convenor:

Bernhard Hengst
Tel: +61-2-9385-3988,
E-mail: bernhardh@cse.unsw.edu.au
School of Computer Science & Engineering, UNSW.