Research

Our group, consisting of thirty graduate students from three different departments of The University of Tokyo and other universities, several visiting scientists, full-time researchers, and supporting staff members, forms a unique interdisciplinary computer vision research center. Our annual research budget approaches approximately 1M U.S. dollars per year. As shown in the figure below, our research field spans areas ranging from fundamental vision theories through applications that include virtual reality, robotics, and intelligent transportation systems. The core paradigm among these areas is how to reduce the amount of cost in programming and monitoring through computer vision techniques. In each area, current research topics are as follows:

• Geometry:
  Modeling cultural heritage objects through observation for virtual reality applications.
• Photometry:
  Physics-based vision theories for modeling object appearanes and illumination environments.
• Robotics:
  Imitation learning of human behaviors, including traditional Japanese tea ceremony and Japanese folk dance, through observation for robot programming.
• ITS:
  Recognition and classification of vehicles for ITS applications, and 3D modeling of real exterior environments by merging photometric and geometric images.
• VR / MR:
  Creation of Virtual Reality and Mixed Reality contents, increasing the reatity of the synthesized image in MR.