Jean Ponce

Ecole Normale Supérieure

 

Abstract
This talk addresses the problem of automated visual recognition, that is, having a computer decide whether an instance of some object class, for example, a chair, a person, or a car, is present in some picture, despite shape and color variations within the class, as well as viewpoint and illumination changes from one photograph to the next. After giving a brief historical perspective on this problem, I will present some recent work aimed at constructing models of both the objects and the recognition process that address different aspects of the problem, including shape variability, finding distinctive parts, and dealing with limited amounts of supervisory information. I will also present some applications to image categorization, object detection, cosegmentation, and video interpretation.

Bio:
Jean Ponce received the Doctorat de Troisieme Cycle and Doctorat d’Etat degrees in Computer Science from the University of Paris Orsay in 1983 and 1988. He has held Research Scientist positions at the Institut National de la Recherche en Informatique et Automatique, the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and the Stanford University Robotics Laboratory, and served on the faculty of the Dept. of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1990 to 2005. Since 2005, he has been a Professor at Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, France, where he now also serves as Head of the Department of Computer Science. In 2003, Dr. Ponce was named an IEEE Fellow for his contributions to Computer Vision, and he received a US patent for the development of a robotic parts feeder. He has served on the editorial boards of Computer Vision and Image Understanding, Foundations and Trends in Computer Graphics and Vision, the IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, the International Journal of Computer Vision (for which he served as Editor-in-Chief from 2003 to 2008), and the SIAM Journal on Imaging Sciences. He was Program Chair of the 1997 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition and served as General Chair of the year 2000 edition of this conference. He also served as General Chair of the 2008 European Conference on Computer Vision. Dr. Ponce is the co-author of Computer Vision: A Modern Approach, a textbook that has been translated in Chinese, Japanese, and Russian, and whose second edition came out in 2011.