Abstract:

Our goal is to take a picture of the Earth from space, using ground-based observations of the Moon.  I'll describe the project, why it's hard, and why it would be useful to do.  I'll describe different approaches (exploiting diffuse reflections, cast shadows, and sunlight phasor fields) and computational imaging spin-offs that have resulted from those approaches.  I'll finish with the current promising approach.

Hosted by College of Engineering and Electrical and Computer Engineering

Biography:

William T. Freeman is the Thomas and Gerd Perkins Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) there.  He was the Associate Department Head of EECS from 2011- 2014.  Since 2015, he has also been a research manager in Google Research in Cambridge, MA.

Dr. Freeman is interested in mid-level vision, audio, and computational photography. Previous research topics include steerable filters and pyramids, orientation histograms, the generic viewpoint assumption, color constancy, computer vision for computer games, motion magnification, and belief propagation in networks with loops. He received outstanding paper awards at computer vision or machine learning conferences in 1997, 2006, 2009, 2012 and 2019, and test-of-time awards for papers from 1990, 1995 and 2005. He shared the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Physics for a consulting role with the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration, which reconstructed the first image of a black hole. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a Fellow of the IEEE, ACM, and AAAI. In 2019, he received the PAMI Distinguished Researcher Award, the highest award in computer vision.

Watch Lecture

Watch Panel

Panel Information