CfAR Distinguished Seminar Series on Vision: "Human Body-Language Understanding by Computer" by Zhengyou Zhang - Microsoft Research

Location: A.V. Williams Building, Room 2460

Abstract:
Recent advances in 3D depth cameras such as Microsoft Kinect sensors have created many opportunities towards a more natural way of interacting with computers and with people across distances. A key enabling technology is human body-language understanding by computer. Only after the computer understands what a user is doing, it can respond/act in a natural way back to the user, or capture the essential information and relay it to remote users. This has always been an active research field in computer vision but proven to be formidably difficult with video cameras. 3D depth cameras such as Microsoft Kinect sensors allow the computer to directly sense the 3rd dimension (depth) of the users and the environment, alleviating the burden of human body-language understanding by computer. In this talk, Dr. Zhang will describe his team's recent work in using such commodity depth cameras for hand gesture recognition, human action recognition, facial expression tracking, engagement detection, human body modeling, and immersive teleconferencing.

Biography:
Zhengyou Zhang received the B.S. degree in electronic engineering from Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China, in 1985, the M.S. degree in computer science from the University of Nancy, France, in 1987, the Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Paris XI, Paris, France, in 1990, and the Doctorate of Science (Habilitation à diriger des recherches) from the University of Paris XI, Paris, France, in 1994.

He is a Principal Researcher with Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, USA, and the Research Manager of the “Multimedia, Interaction, and Communication” group. He is also an Affiliate Professor with the University of Washington, Seattle, USA, and an Adjunct Chair Professor with Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China. He has published over 200 papers in refereed international journals and conferences, and has coauthored the following books: 3-D Dynamic Scene Analysis: A Stereo Based Approach (Springer-Verlag, 1992); Epipolar Geometry in Stereo, Motion and Object Recognition (Kluwer, 1996); Computer Vision (Chinese Academy of Sciences, 1998, 2003, in Chinese); Face Detection and Adaptation (Morgan and Claypool, 2010); and Face Geometry and Appearance Modeling (Cambridge University Press, 2011).

Dr. Zhang is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), the Founding Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Autonomous Mental Development, an Associate Editor of the International Journal of Computer Vision, an Associate Editor of Machine Vision and Applications, and an Area Editor of the Journal of Computer Science and Technology.

For more information about the seminar, contact Janice M. Perrone at (301) 405-1736 or janice[at]cfar[dot]umd[dot]edu