[Brown CS Talks] Brown CS Seminar: Thomas Funkhouser in Lubrano on 9/12/02 at 1 pm.

[talks-admin@list.cs.brown.edu]

			      CS Seminar
		  
		  The Department of Computer Science
			   BROWN UNIVERSITY

			      
			       presents

			Thomas Funkhouser
		   
			    
			Princeton University
				 
		 Thursday, September 12, 2002 at 1 pm
	       Lubrano Conference Room (CIT 4th floor)
	       Refreshments will be served at 11:45 am

	       
		   Shape-Based Search for 3D Models
 

As the number of 3D models available on the Web grows, there is an
increasing need for a search engine to help people find them (e.g., a
Google for 3D models).  Unfortunately, traditional text-based search
techniques are not always effective for 3D data.  In this talk, we
investigate new shape-based search methods.  A key challenge is to
find a computational representation of shape (a ``shape descriptor'')
that is concise, robust, quick to compute, efficient to match, and
discriminating between similar and dissimilar shapes.  In this talk, I
will describe shape descriptors designed for computer graphics models
commonly found on the Web (i.e., they may contain arbitrary
degeneracies and alignments).  We have experimented with them in a
Web-based search engine that allows users to query for 3D models based
on similarities to 3D sketches, 3D models, 2D sketches, and/or text
keywords.  We find our best shape descriptors provide better
precision-recall performance than related 3D shape matching methods
and are fast enough to find satisfy queries in under a second.  You
can try them out at: http://shape.cs.princeton.edu.

Joint work with Patrick Min, Michael Kazhdan, Joyce Chen, Alex
Halderman, David Dobkin, and David Jacobs.


		     Host: Professor John Hughes