Linguang Zhang will be presenting his General Exam on Thursday, May 05, 2016 at 10am in CS 402. The members of his committee are Szymon Rusinkiewicz (adviser), Adam Finkelstein, and Tom Funkhouser. Everyone is invited to attend his talk, and those faculty wishing to remain for the oral exam following are welcome to do so. His abstract and reading list follow below. Abstract The Global Positioning System (GPS) is being widely used on almost every mobile device nowadays, and it is playing critical roles in many tasks which require location information. However, GPS is typically used outdoors, and the accuracy of commercial GPS devices is usually limited to few meters. In this work, we attempt to design an image-based global micro-positioning system which can achieve an accuracy of few centimeters and is reliable both indoors and outdoors. The key idea behind of our system is that random textures in the real world always have imperfections such as cracks or scratches which are persistently visible. To capture these minor details, our system includes a downward-facing camera that observes fine textures on the ground as well as an image processing unit that will locate the observed texture patches in a large database constructed in the training phase. Instead of the images themselves, distinctive features extracted from the images along with the global location information are stored in the database using an efficient data structure so that localization is fast. ----------------------- Reading list Textbook : Computer Vision: Algorithms and Applications [SIFT] Lowe, David G. "Distinctive image features from scale-invariant keypoints." International journal of computer vision 60.2 (2004): 91-110. [D-NETS] Von Hundelshausen, Felix, and Rahul Sukthankar. "D-nets: Beyond patch-based image descriptors." Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2012 IEEE Conference on. IEEE, 2012. [DISTINCTIVE] Shilane, Philip, and Thomas Funkhouser. "Selecting distinctive 3D shape descriptors for similarity retrieval." Shape Modeling and Applications, 2006. SMI 2006. IEEE International Conference on. IEEE, 2006. [PATCHMATCH] Barnes, Connelly, et al. "The PatchMatch randomized matching algorithm for image manipulation." Communications of the ACM 54.11 (2011): 103-110. [FLANN] Muja, Marius, and David G. Lowe. "Fast Approximate Nearest Neighbors with Automatic Algorithm Configuration." VISAPP (1) 2 (2009): 331-340. [FINGERPRINT] Clarkson, William, et al. "Fingerprinting blank paper using commodity scanners." Security and Privacy, 2009 30th IEEE Symposium on. IEEE, 2009. [GOOD FEATURES] Shi, Jianbo, and Carlo Tomasi. "Good features to track." Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 1994. Proceedings CVPR'94., 1994 IEEE Computer Society Conference on. IEEE, 1994. [MATCHABILITY] Hartmann, Wilfried, Michal Havlena, and Konrad Schindler. "Predicting matchability." Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. 2014. [ROBOT] Kelly, Alonzo, et al. "Field and service applications-an infrastructure-free automated guided vehicle based on computer vision-an effort to make an industrial robot vehicle that can operate without supporting infrastructure." Robotics & Automation Magazine, IEEE 14.3 (2007): 24-34. [BOLD] Balntas, Vassileios, Lilian Tang, and Krystian Mikolajczyk. "BOLD-Binary Online Learned Descriptor For Efficient Image Matching." Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. 2015. [4PCS] Aiger, Dror, Niloy J. Mitra, and Daniel Cohen-Or. "4-points congruent sets for robust pairwise surface registration." ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG). Vol. 27. No. 3. ACM, 2008. [FOURIER] Zhang, Dengsheng, and Guojun Lu. "Generic Fourier descriptor for shape-based image retrieval." Multimedia and Expo, 2002. ICME'02. Proceedings. 2002 IEEE International Conference on. Vol. 1. IEEE, 2002.