Talks: Human Computer Vision Series

Psychology has always treated behavior and experience as embedded in a unidimensional flow in time the “stream of behavior”. This means that events and actions occupy non-overlapping time-intervals in this

Arguably quantitative neuroscience was born when scientists started to correlate the activity of a neuron with sensory stimuli. But complex stimuli such as natural ones are encoded in the activity

The human visual system can be highly impacted by changes to visual presentation. Understanding these impacts has been of great interest in both the vision sciences and applied research. The

This talk will provide a systematic overview on developing computational models of the next generation of narrative-driven interactive virtual worlds. To this end we will identify and address several key

To view a recording of this talk click here (You will need a Rutgers NetID and password) The idea that our perceptions can be incorrect can be traced back to

Our visual system has the ability to encode the statistical properties of large sets of objects on several feature dimensions such as size speed and orientation. Statistical processing is considered

Neural firing rates in the macaque lateral intraparietal (LIP) cortex exhibit gradual "ramping" that is commonly believed to reflect the accumulation of sensory evidence during decision-making. However ramping that appears

The fundamental goal of perception is to aid in the achievement of behavioral objectives. This requires extracting and communicating useful information from noisy and uncertain sensory signals. At the same

My research explores how people learn from their interactions with the world around them. For example how are we so good at figuring out how something works by tinkering with

In natural behavior visual information is actively sampled from the environment by a sequence of gaze changes. The timing and choice of gaze targets and the accompanying attentional shifts are

Our cognitive abilities including the way we learn perceive execute tasks make decisions or improve with training vary widely from one another and change as we age. Such variability may

Visual object perception is a complex cognitive process. Given the same input processing can occur at multiple distinct levels. At the finest level we notice object texture and material properties;

Comparing two visual stimuli that occur at different times demands the coordination of bottom-up and top-down processes. Such tasks require processing and storage of sensory stimuli followed by their retrieval

Virtual humans are autonomous virtual characters that are designed to act like humans and interact with them in shared virtual environments much as humans interact face-to-face with other humans. Increasingly

Neural decoding models relate neuronal activities to perception. However these models typically decode neuronal responses for a single stimulus at a time to arrive at a value or a distribution

Retinal images are perspective projections of the visual environment. Despite this it is not selfevident that visual space is a perspective representation of physical space. Analysis of underlying spatial transformations

Perceptual grouping played a prominent role in support of early object recognition systems which typically took an input image and a database of shape models and identified which of the

Line drawings depict 3D shape using "minimal" information. Computer graphics algorithms have used different geometric surface features to define lines. While no line definition is universally superior to others (Cole09)

New neurons are added to specific regions of the vertebrate brain throughout life and are thought to function in learning and the formation of new memories. Although many of these

Accurate perception of motion is essential in sighted animals for locomotion and for detection of predators and prey. Further accurate motion perception depends critically on accurate estimation of motion speed

My lab studies the neural circuitry that allows mice to detect sensory stimuli and perform sensory-guided discrimination tasks using their whiskers. I will discuss experiments in which mice are trained

In everyday life we rely on color information to select objects as the targets of our actions (e.g. the ripest fruit the freshest fish). To be useful for such tasks

Traditionally studies on action cognition have focused on tasks people perform by themselves. Much of what people do concerns performing actions together with others. Engaging in joint action allows people

Human vision system is able to recognize a wide range of targets under challenging conditions but has limited throughput. Machine vision and automatic content analytics can process images at a

Our work aims to make robots a seamless technology that people can easily use and program for a wide variety of purposes. We posit that the convergence of robotics with

Human vision has the ability to perceive 3D shape from line drawings although most of the area in a line drawing image except the contours has no information about depth

Humans and nonhuman primates are extraordinarily sensitive to breaks in the collinearity of lines and edges an ability that is likely an important component of visual mechanisms that perceive and

Good decision-making requires the decision-maker to generate accurate expectations about what is likely to happen in the future. Adults' decisions especially those pertaining to attention and learning are guided by

The brain uses its prior knowledge of the world to help resolve ambiguities in the sensory information. We study the neural mechanisms of this disambiguation process from a machine learning

Attention allows us to select relevant sensory information for preferential processing. One prominent role of attention is the modulation of performance in tasks that involve the visual system’s spatial resolution.

We heavily rely on information from our visual system to help coordinate our daily interactions in the environment. Yet our understanding of how top-down visual processes modulate the execution of

Peripheral sensory inputs to the brain are generally presumed to be purely "bottom-up " that is to strictly reflect the external sensory stimulus but this presumption has rarely been tested

The brain sitting inside its bony cavity sends and receives myriads of sensory inputs and outputs. A problem that must be solved either in ontogeny or phylogeny is how to

In models of perception under uncertainty the terms “optimal” and “probabilistic” are often used interchangeably. I will argue that they have distinct meanings and are associated with different experimental designs.

Searching for a visual target interferes with detecting background changes and performing an auditory detection task interferes with a sequential response task. These well-known findings show that divided attention within

In 1907 Sir Francis Galton observed in Nature that given the estimates of a large group of people the median response was better than that of any expert. He begrudgingly

In the decades from 1970-1990 there was an optimism that strong connections could be made between psychophysics and the neural interactions found in retina and cortex. That optimism faded for

Research on human and animal behavior has long emphasized its hierarchical structure according to which tasks are comprised of subtask sequences which are themselves built of simple actions. The hierarchical

We present three examples where in vivo electrophysiological recordings from neurons have helped us to resolve long-standing conundrums in human visual perception: 1. We show that the greater salience of

Although physical interaction with the world is at the core of human experience few computer and machine interfaces provide the operator with high-fidelitytouch feedback limiting their usability. Similarly autonomous robots

Adaptive procedures are developed to reduce the burden of data collection in psychophys­ics by creating more efficient experimental test designs and methods of estimating either statistics or parameters. In some

Estimating the 3D shape of objects in our environment is one of the most fundamental problems in visual perception yet it remains rather poorly understood. If you pick up a

Video understanding is at the forefront of modern computer vision. The lay and technical communities alike are drowning with videos---e.g. YouTube reports 72 hours of video uploaded each minute. Transforming

We propose a Bayesian approach to perceptual grouping in which the goal of the computation is to estimate the organization that best explains an observed configuration of image elements. We

Reconstructing 3D Human pose is critical to computer vision applications involving humans and human activity recognition. Many different sensors have been used to accurately reconstruct 3D pose. However each has

In this talk algorithms that create and refine plans in order to maximize a numeric reward over time are discussed. One of the ways this problem can be formalized is

One of the open questions in dealing with the low-functioning part of the population with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) is how we can facilitate learning under the condition that no

SPRING COGNITIVE FESTIVAL Wednesday February 27 2013 12:45 pm – 2:00 pm Psychology Building Room 101 LIGHT LUNCH SERVED @ 12:45PM outside room 101 PRESENTATIONS BEGIN @ 01:00PM inside