A copy of his thesis is available upon request.  Everyone is invited to attend his talk. The talk  abstract follows below:

Many computer vision applications including image matching, image-based reconstruction and localization rely on extracting and matching robust local features. A

typical local feature pipeline first detects repeatable keypoints in the image (i.e., keypoint detector), and then computes a short vector to uniquely describe each keypoint

(i.e., feature descriptor). Both the keypoint detector and the feature descriptor are

conventionally hand-crafted based on what is intuitive to the designer. For example, corners or blobs are popular choices of keypoints, and the image gradient is a

useful clue for descriptors. However, it is often dicult to define these principles to

accommodate various applications. In this thesis, we study data-driven approaches

which can more easily tailor the local feature pipeline for target applications. We start

with a mobile robotics application that leverages local features extracted from ground

texture images to achieve high-precision global localization. The second part of the

thesis addresses the problem that existing keypoint detectors that are optimized for

natural images su↵er from sub-optimal performance on texture images. We therefore

learn a keypoint detector specifically for each type of texture using a deep neural network. Our detector automatically learns to identify keypoints that are distinctive in

the target texture rather than relying on a set of pre-defined rules. Finally, we focus

on a non-parametric approach for learning feature descriptors. Many well-performing

local feature descriptors are trained using a triplet loss that includes a tunable margin, which limits its ability to generalize to other types of data and problems. We

propose to replace the hard margin with a soft margin that self-tunes as learning

progresses. To summarize, we first demonstrate through a novel visual-based localization system where a customized local feature pipeline is critical. Then, we tackle

both the keypoint detector and the feature descriptor with generalizable data-driven

approaches.