Robert J. WoodhamRobert J. Woodham
Professor
Department of Computer Science
University of British Columbia
Vancouver, BC
V6T 1Z4
Canada
tel: (604) 822-4368
fax: (604) 822-5485
email: 
www: http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~woodham/
CPSC 425 Computer Vision
Winter Session 2011/12 (term 2, section 201)
COGS 300 Understanding and Designing Cognitive Systems
Winter Session 2011/12 (term 1, section 001)
(Co-instructor with
Lawrence Ward,
Psychology)
BA, UWO (1971)
SM, MIT (1974)
EE, MIT (1974)
Ph.D, MIT (1977)
Research Scientist, MIT (1977 – 78)
Assistant Professor, UBC (1978 – 82)
Associate Professor, UBC (1982 – 90)
Professor, UBC (1990 – )
Fellow, Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, (1984 – 1994)
Head, Department of Computer Science, UBC (1995 – 2003)
My goal is to make intelligent machines that see. Seeing is defined operationally as the ability to produce symbolic interpretations of a 3D world from 2D images of that world sufficient to carry out a specified task. Research consists of selecting a task, identifying the essential constraints of the task, defining computations that make vision possible for the task and implementing proof–of–concept computer systems to study performance in both real and controlled experimental situations. The view taken is that one needs to model the physics of image formation in order to extract information about the world from images. My primary research contribution has been to demonstrate that radiometric constraints can be formulated and exploited in machine vision. New methods based on photometric stereo have been developed for determining dense representations of surface shape, including surface curvature. This work has application to the robot vision tasks of object recognition, localization and inspection. The idea of using multiple light sources also has been exploited in a novel approach to determine the optical flow created when objects (or a robot perceiver) are in motion. This work has application to the tasks of object identification, object tracking and robot navigation in dynamic environments. Another test-bed for my research has been the computer interpretation of remotely sensed data. Here, the task is to determine intrinsic surface properties related to ground cover, independent of topography and conditions of illumination. With the methods developed, it is possible to decouple direct solar irradiance, diffuse sky irradiance and atmospheric effects from ground cover and topography. The practical goal in remote sensing is to extend the range of terrain and imaging conditions that can be handled by automatic image analysis systems. The availability and demand for remotely sensed imagery and other spatially-referenced data is increasing dramatically. The challenges for data retrieval, analysis and interpretation are substantial. I collaborate on projects with researchers in databases, computational geometry and knowledge-based systems in the general area of visual information management.
My research home is the Laboratory for Computational Intelligence (LCI). Check there for information about the various projects I and other LCI researchers are involved in.
F. Li and R. J. Woodham, Video analysis of hockey play in selected game situations. Image and Vision Computing, 27(1–2),45–58 (2009). (doi:10.1016/j.imavis.2006.10.010)
R. J. Woodham, Colour is a medium as well as a message. In Colour Perception: Philosophical, Psychological, Artistic and Computational Perspectives (S. Davis, ed.), pp. 117–140, Vancouver Studies in Cognitive Science, Volume 9, Oxford University Press (2000). (PDF)
R. J. Woodham, Gradient and Curvature from the Photometric Stereo Method, Including Local Confidence Estimation. Journal of the Optical Society of America, A 11(11)3050–3068 (1994). (PDF)
Y. Li and R. J. Woodham, Orientation-Based Representations of 3-D shape. Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 182–187 (1994).
R. J. Woodham, Multiple Light Source Optical Flow. Proceedings 3rd International Conference on Computer Vision, pp. 42–46, Osaka, Japan (1990). (scanned PDF)
R. J. Woodham and M. H. Gray, Analytic Method for Radiometric Correction of Satellite Multispectral Scanner Data. IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing (GE-25) pp. 258–271 (1987).
R. J. Woodham, Photometric Method for Determining Surface Orientation from Multiple Images. Optical Engineering 19(1)139–144 (1980). (scanned PDF)
