I'm Harlyn Baker
I'm a long time 3D vision researcher and I'm the founder of EPIImaging
3D computer vision has been an academic endeavor for many decades and with a
huge number of applications developing now because of mobile computing and
effectively the cell phone wars that have brought us great advances in
cameras and processors, it is becoming very important.
It has applications in augmented reality and virtual reality where you want to
both capture scenes to project to people and to know where people are looking in the world,
what their world looks like, to put objects into their environment
it's important in self-driving vehicles like cars and drones
where you need to have 3D geometry
it's important in robotics particularly maybe humanoid robotics where we have
to deal with devices that will soon be walking among us and having to interact
with all the uncertainties of the world.
The technology I am promoting is one that we developed a long time ago,
back in the days of single cameras, and we asked the question back then
what happens, what will happen
when cameras are tiny and when they're cheap
basically free; what happens when the bandwidth that we were
struggling with is no longer a problem
and we developed methodologies that sort of took care of that, that said
this is what you might do, and that's what
in fact we're doing now, we're looking at solutions that involve a different approach
and its an approach that is coupled with something called Light Fields
where you take many many cameras, you capture a huge amount of data
much more than people might think is necessary but that isn't the point
these cameras are free, cameras are tiny, and the bandwidth is all doable -
its all handleable by our new capabilities.
So what can we do with that? Well, what we can do is we can have solutions that
capitalize on redundancy, and that give us results that have
much higher accuracy and much greater precision; important features
you don't want systems that make mistakes. So with the extra cameras that
we use, and I use tens, twenties, thirties, hundreds, and I'm building them into fingertips of robots,
I'm building them into drones,
I'm building them into vehicles like cars, I'm building them into light-field cameras
for capturing immersive cinema -- about a meter by meter -- all these
are massive numbers of cameras
thousands perhaps, different sizes, different characteristics, but their purpose
is to enable bringing in the constraints that one can have with these analyses
when you get beyond the old approaches, and use even older approaches
but that were perhaps ahead of their time, that are now viable.
So the challenge is to use these technologies and these advances
to capture the 3D geometry of the world.