Course Abstract
With the slogan, “You press the button, we do the rest,” George Eastman brought photography to the masses through the invention of flexible film in 1884 and the first box camera in 1888. Since that time, photography has evolved rather gradually as a medium. However, in just the past five years, there has been a sudden transition: digital photography has all but replaced traditional photography, using “electronic film” in the form of solid state sensor arrays. In this course, we will explore how digital photography is not just a replacement for film, but -- through advances in technology, analysis, and software tools -- is surpassing its predecessor and enabling dramatic improvements in imaging and in artistic freedom.
This one-time seminar course will be co-taught this Spring Quarter by Brian Curless and David Salesin. We also plan to have guest lectures and significant participation by our various affiliate graphics faculty at Microsoft Research -- Maneesh Agrawala, Michael Cohen, and Rick Szeliski -- as well as special lectures by other distinguished faculty and visitors.
There is also a second, “hidden” agenda to the class, which is to teach about the process of research, and in so doing, prepare students for PhD thesis work in computer science. Along the way, we also hope to launch some interesting new research projects that will develop into Quals projects at the very least, and hopefully some publishable results as well. (This was certainly the case the last two times that CSE 558 was offered in this form (once in ’95 and once in ’97): the various class projects from these two offerings eventually led to five Quals projects, one General’s, four SIGGRAPH papers, one I3D paper, and two PhD theses -- so far! :))
Here's the plan: in the course, we'll tackle -- as a class -- three different research projects, with each project lasting roughly 3 weeks. Students will work in teams of 2-4 (with more senior students teaming up with more junior ones), and teams changing from the one project to the next. Lectures will cover the theoretical material required for the research projects. Students will also present papers relevant to the project at hand. After the first couple of weeks of lectures and paper presentations, we will begin devoting one of the class periods each week to a “group research meeting,” in which each team will report back results from the previous week's work, and in which we'll plan, as a group, new approaches for the following week. Students will also be expected to take digital photographs on a daily basis during the course of the quarter, and we’ll have regular weekly critiques in which we’ll try to push not just the research frontiers, but also the artistic frontiers of digital photography.
The course will be essentially self-contained and will require neither detailed knowledge of mathematics nor an artistic background. Nevertheless, some mathematical sophistication and aesthetic sense, as well as a mastery of graphics programming, would be most welcome.
Course requirements
Students in the course are expected to participate in several different ways:
Attending the lectures, reading the assigned papers, and participating in class discussions.
Working in teams on three different 3-week research projects, including two presentations and two write-ups for each (a "proposal" and a "final presentation/report").
Presenting one research paper to the class.
Taking daily photographs and participating in a weekly critique.
Course calendar
Our schedule will look something like this:
3/31 Introduction. 4/2 Lecture: "Sensors" [Brian]
4/7 Lecture: "Super-resolution" [Rick]; Project #1 ("Super-resolution") assigned.
4/9 Lecture: "Optical flow" [Rick]
4/14 Project #1 proposal presentations. 4/16 Lecture: "Lenses" [Brian]
4/21 Discussion: Project #1. 4/23 Lecture: "Image mosaics" [Rick]
4/28 Project #1 Final Presentations; Project #2 ("Time-Lapse Mosaics") assigned.
4/30 Lecture: "Image databases" [Steve Drucker]
5/5 Project #2 proposal presentations. 5/7 Lecture: "Image stacks" [Michael]
5/12 Discussion: Project #2 5/14 Lecture: "Principles of traditional photography" [David]
5/19 Project #1 Final Presentations; Project #3 assigned. 5/21 Lecture: "Capturing and post-processing digital images" [Alvy Ray Smith]
5/26 Holiday 5/28 Project #3 proposal presentations.
6/2 Lecture: "Genesis and technology of electronic panoramic cameras" [Mike Sinclair] 6/4 Discussion: Project #3
6/12 Project #3 Final Presentations
Projects
We envision three projects, the first two of which are confined to specific themes, and the final project completely open ended. For more details on the projects, visit the projects page.