CS 116: Computational Photography

Instructor: Charless Fowlkes
Lectures: MW 2-3:30 in ICS 180
Office Hours: M 3:30-4:30

This class introduces the computational and mathematical problems of computer vision through the application of computational photography. Computational photography is an emerging field at the intersection of vision, graphics, and increasingly, machine learning. It deals with computational mechanisms for creating, enhancing, and interpreting digital images. The course will describe algorithmic techniques for low-level image understanding, including applications such as geometric reconstruction, warping, registration, denoising and deblurring, and hole-filling and blending. The course will also introduce high-level algorithms for image understanding including object recognition and detection. Students will acquire knowledge of image formation, including camera optics, imaging transformations, and basic image processing. The course assumes a background knowledge of linear algebra and probability, but will introduce linear least squares, classification, and dynamic programming. The class will emphasize hands-on implementation of the presented algorithms through numerous homework projects. Students will be encouraged to acquire their own images of indoor and outdoor scenes for the project assignments.

We will make use of this book. "Computer Vision: Algorithms and Applications" by Richard Szeliski.

• Week 1 : Intro, Cameras
• Week 2 : Images, Color and Sensors
• Week 3 : Filters and Image Processing
• Week 4 : Warping and Morphing
• Week 5 : Features and Correspondence
• Week 6 : Projection and Homographies
• Week 7 : Stereo and Reconstruction
• Week 8 : Matting, Blending and Seam Carving
• Week 9 : Inpainting and Texture Synthesis
• Week 10 : Object Recognition

• Assignment 1 : MATLAB tutorial and Image Filtering (due 1/23)
  We will use MATLAB for the programming assignments so this assignment is to help you get acquainted. You will also work with image filtering.
• Assignment 2 : Warping and Morphing (due 2/6)
  For this assignment we will explore image warping in order to produce a morph between two images
  
  Check out some of the morph results here!
• Assignment 3 : Mosaics (due 2/22)
  For this assignment we will estimate homographies in order to align images and blend them into a mosaic.
• Assignment 4 : Detection (due 3/15)
  For this assignment we will build a simple template-based object detector using orientation histograms.

The grading for this class will be based primarily on homeworks

There will be roughly 5 assignments during the quarter. Each is due by 11:59pm on the specified due date. Work turned in late will not be graded so please just hand in whatever you have completed. Assignments should be uploaded to the appropriate EEE Dropbox. 

Extra credit: if you submit an assignment 24 hours early, you will automatically get 5% extra credit on the assignment (e.g. if the assignment is worth 100 points you will get 5 pts extra credit).  

You will be required to use MATLAB for some of your homework problems. MATLAB is available on about 34 machines in the CS 364 lab - the machines are in 3 rows front of the lab assistant's desk and to the left of this desk as you face away from it.

You are asked to be respectful of your student colleagues and instructor in class, not being disruptive or otherwise distracting others in the classroom. This includes turning off cell-phones and not using your laptops during class.

Academic honesty is taken seriously. For homework problems or programming assignments you are allowed to discuss the problems or assignments verbally with other class members, but under no circumstances can you look at or copy anyone else's written solutions or code relating to homework problems or programming assignments. All problem solutions submitted must be material you have personally written during this quarter.

Failure to adhere to this policy can result in a student receiving a failing grade in the class. It is the responsibility of each student to be familiar with UCI's current academic honesty policies. Please take the time to read the current UCI Senate Academic Honesty Policies (in Spring Schedule of Classes, a few pages from the end). Also you may want to look at the ICS Department's policies on academic honesty .