Derek Hoiem

I'm a computer science assistant professor at UIUC (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign). My main interest is in general visual scene understanding. Scene understanding is the ability to infer general principles and current situations in a way that helps to achieve goals. So far, much progress has been made by breaking down vision into a set of narrowly defined tasks and tackling them as independent pattern matching or image processing problems. I want to think of vision in terms of real-world space, surfaces, objects, and relations. I also want to develop frameworks that allow visual knowledge to be accumulated, so that each task contributes to a worldview that makes learning new tasks easier. My past includes a Postgraduate Beckman Fellowship at UIUC, Ph.D. at the Robotics Institute at CMU with Alyosha Efros and Martial Hebert, and collaborations at Intel Research Pittsburgh and Microsoft Research Cambridge.

My research follows three main themes:

• Recognizing Objects and their Properties: By thinking of objects in terms of properties, rather than names, we can improve generalization, robustness to unfamiliarity, and the scalability of recognition.
• Spatial Understanding from Images: How can we recover a spatial layout of the scene and its objects from an image?
• Physically Grounded Scene Interpretation: How can we interpret objects and their interactions within the physical space of the scene?

Use the guide to the left to find publications, projects, software, and presentations (click Home if you do not see the links). Prospective students can find related info in the Contact page.

• Ali Farhadi, 2011, now Asst. Prof. at UW
• Gang Wang, 2010, now Asst. Prof. at NTU, Singapore
• Varsha Hedau, 2011, now at Microsoft

Also see the Computer Vision Group webpage.

Current and former MS students

• Pritam Sukumar (current)
• Sujay Bhobe (current)
• Prateek Rungta, "Kinect Cloud Normals: Towards Surface Orientation Estimation", 2011

Current and former undergraduate students

• Bryan Plummer, RA (current)
• Johnston Jiaa, senior thesis (current)
• Keunhong Park, senior thesis (current)
• Chao Xia, senior thesis, "Compact Vision Inspection Platform", 2012
• Xing Li, RA, 2012
• Jeff Chyan, honors project on animal pose classication, 2010
• Wei (Alex) Lou, senior thesis, "Cross-Category Based Object Pose Prediction", 2011
• Brinda Gupta, RA, 2011
• Nive Suresh, RA, 2010
• Priya Dandawate, "Pose Recognition of Animals", 2010
• Arash Kahn, texture property recognition, 2010
• Yodsawalai Chodpathumwan, RA, "Report on Factors Influencing Object Detection", 2010-11
• Doheum Park, senior thesis, "Web Cam Eye Gaze Estimation with Lighting Interaction", 2011

Funding

NSF Award 10-53768 for "CAREER: Large-Scale Recognition using Shared Structures, Flexible Learning, and Efficient Search" (2011-2015)
ONR MURI Award for "Rich Representations with Exposed Semantics for Deep Visual Reasonings" (2010-2014)
NSF Award 09-04209 for "Physically Grounded Object Recognition" (2009-2013)
NSF Award 09-16014 for "Exploiting Geometric and Illumination Context in Indoor Scenes" (2009-2012)
Google Research Award for "Describing Objects by their Attributes from Images" (2009-2010)
Gifts from Microsoft (2009, 2010)
Gift from Intel (2011)
Intel Early Career Faculty Award (2012)
Sloan Fellowship (2013)

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