Maciej Halber will present his Generals on 5/1/15 at 3pm in 301. The members of his committee are: Thomas A. Funkhouser (Adviser), Adam Finkelstein, and Jianxiong Xiao. 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: Urban reconstruction is a long-standing and challenging task in computer graphics and vision. In this project we explore ways of producing texture images needed for producing virtual representation of cities. Given a large dataset of street-side images and accompanying LiDaR data, the goal is to be able to generate high quality facade textures - images depicting building facades that are both globally correct (underlying structure of a facade is preserved) and free of local artifacts (such as seams). The challenge comes from a many undesirable properties of such datasets - buildings are in most cases not observed from fronto-parallel views, are often partially-occluded and, especially for tall buildings, they might not be completely captured in any of the input images. In this work we present a system designed to deal with such issues. Presented system first detects simple planar geometry from LiDaR data, followed by a two stage synthesis process. Street-side images are first merged using per pixel quality metric, computed from geometrical relationship between camera and the detected plane. Initial merges are then combined and refined in the second stage to generate a plausible completion of unknown, unobserved parts of the facade. This is achieved using a state-of-the-art texture synthesis approach, where the optimized distance function considers not only the local color properties, but also leverages information about input image quality and underlying structure of a facade. Reading list: 1. Fundametals of Computer Graphics; Peter Shirley; Steve Marschner Publisher: A K Peters/CRC Press; 3rd edition (July 21, 2009) ISBN-10: 1568814690 ISBN-13: 978-1568814698 2. State of the Art in Example-based Texture Synthesis; Wei, Li-Yi and Lefebvre, Sylvain and Kwatra, Vivek and Turk, Greg; Eurographics 2009 3. A Survey of Urban Reconstruction; Przemyslaw Musialski, Peter Wonka, Daniel G. Aliaga, Michael Wimmer, Luc van Gool, Werner Purgathofer; Computer Graphics Forum 2013 4. Region Filling and Object Removal by Exemplar-based Image Inpainting; Criminisi, A. and Perez, P. and Toyama, K.; Trans. Img. Proc. 2004 5. Texture Optimization for Example-based Synthesis; Vivek Kwatra and Irfan Essa and Aaron Bobick and Nipun Kwatra; ACM Transactions on Graphics, SIGGRAPH 2005 6. PatchMatch: A Randomized Correspondence Algorithm for Structural Image Editing; Connelly Barnes and Eli Shechtman and Adam Finkelstein and Dan B Goldman; ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. SIGGRAPH); 2009; 7. Space-Time Completion of Video; Wexler, Yonatan and Shechtman, Eli and Irani, Michal; IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 2007; 8. Image Melding: Combining Inconsistent Images using Patch-based Synthesis; Soheil Darabi and Eli Shechtman and Connelly Barnes and Dan B Goldman and Pradeep Sen; ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG) (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2012); 9. Image Completion using Planar Structure Guidance; Jia-Bin Huang, Sing Bing Kang, Narendra Ahuja, and Johannes Kopf; ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2014); 10. Symmetry - Guided texture Synthesis and Manipulation; Vladimir G. Kim and Yaron Lipman and Thomas Funkhouser; ACM Transactions on Graphics 2012; 11 .Transformation Guided Image Completion; Huang, J-. B. and Kopf, J. and Ahuja, N. and Kang, S. B.; International Conference on Computational Photography 2013; 12. Image-based Street-side City Modeling; Xiao, Jianxiong and Fang, Tian and Zhao, Peng and Lhuillier, Maxime and Quan, Long; ACM Transactions on Graphics 2009; 13. Interactive Multi-View Facade Image Editing; Przemyslaw Musialski and Christian Luksch and Michael Schwarzler and Matthias Buchetics and Stefan Maierhofer and Werner Purgathofer; Vision, Modeling and Visualization Workshop 2010; 14. Semantic Decomposition and Reconstruction of Residential Scenes from LiDAR Data; Lin, Hui and Gao, Jizhou and Zhou, Yu and Lu, Guiliang and Ye, Mao and Zhang, Chenxi and Liu, Ligang and Yang, Ruigang; ACM Transactions on Graphics, (Proc. of SIGGRAPH 2013)