VizWorld.com

via How Does LASIK Work?.

Click for Fullsize

infographics biomed, surgical, vision

Computer vision systems are becoming increasingly common, but also increasingly complex as we get closer and closer to understanding how the human eye and brain collect, store, and organize information.  The Visual Neuroscience Group at the Rowland Instititute at Harvard is in the business of computer vision and needed some pretty intense computational power to crunch some numbers.  They decided to venture into the new arena of GPU computing, and built an incredibly powerful computer that fits into a mere 18-inch cube.

A few months ago, nVidia generously donated 8 of their impressive 9800GX2 graphics cards to our lab, to help us scale-up our efforts. The resulting machine is described below. With peak performance around 4 TFLOPs (4 billion floating point operations per second), this little 18”x18”x18” cube is perhaps one of the world’s most compact and inexpensive supercomputers.

Be sure to check out the Flickr gallery showing the build & completed system.

via Visual Neuroscience Group | David Cox, Principal Investigator.

Hardware hpc, nvidia, research, vision

Video cameras have become integrated into many devices. Intel is looking to take advantage of these video cameras for gesture based interaction. Intel’s Tony Chun describes mobile augmented reality for develping accelerators to be used in smart phones for image recognition and speech recognition. You can hit the link below for a two minute video describing the technology. From Intel’s website:

As video cameras are integrated into more devices from laptops to phones, computer vision capabilities have become increasingly attractive to enable applications such as gesture-based user interfaces and augmented reality. Intel has demonstrated a functional, reconfigurable hardware accelerator to enable advanced vision capabilities on mobile devices. This research from Intel Labs, St. Petersburg explores the automated design of reconfigurable accelerators based on tools-aided application analysis targeting computationally-intensive media workloads such as the SURF object recognition algorithm.

via Intel : Computer Vision Accelerator

Science computer, intel, vision

The recipients of the prestigious MacArthur fellowships for 2009 have been announced, and one of them is computer vision researcher Maneesh Agrawala.

Working at the intersection of visualization, human-computer interaction, and computer graphics, Agrawala, aged 37, draws on cognitive psychology to identify the key perceptual and design principles underlying graphic illustrations.

Agrawala’s novel approach to visualization and computer communication in these and many other projects is transforming how we use, synthesize, and comprehend the ever-increasing volume of digital information we encounter in our daily lives.

I look forward to seeing what his half-million will produce.

via 2 Indians win MacArthur’s ‘genius’ fellowship: Rediff.com news.

Science macarthur, vision