Aljosa Smolic
Interest in immersive media increased significantly over recent year. Besides applications in entertainment, culture, health, industry, etc., telepresence and remote collaboration gained importance due to the pandemic and climate crisis. Immersive media have the potential to increase social integration and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. As a result, technologies along the whole pipeline from capture to display are maturing and applications are becoming available, creating business opportunities.
One aspect of immersive technologies that is still relatively undeveloped is the understanding of perception and quality, including subjective and objective assessment. The interactive nature of immersive media poses new challenges to estimation of saliency or visual attention, and to development of quality metrics. The V-SENSE lab of Trinity College Dublin addresses these questions in current research. This talk will highlight corresponding examples in 360 VR video, light fields, volumetric video and XR.
Bio
Prof. Aljosa Smolic is the SFI Research Professor of Creative Technologies at Trinity College Dublin (TCD). Before joining TCD, Prof. Smolic was with Disney Research Zurich as Senior Research Scientist and Head of the Advanced Video Technology group, and with the Fraunhofer Heinrich-Hertz-Institut (HHI), Berlin, also heading a research group as Scientific Project Manager. At Disney Research he led over 50 R&D projects in the area of visual computing that have resulted in numerous publications and patents, as well as technology transfers to a range of Disney business units. Prof. Smolic served as Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing and the Signal Processing: Image Communication journal. He was Guest Editor for the Proceedings of the IEEE, IEEE Transactions on CSVT, IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, and other scientific journals. His research group at TCD, V-SENSE, is on visual computing, combining computer vision, computer graphics and media technology, to extend the dimensions of visual sensation. This includes immersive technologies such as AR, VR, volumetric video, 360/omni-directional video, light-fields, and VFX/animation, with a special focus on deep learning in visual computing. Prof. Smolic is also co-founder of the start-up company Volograms, which commercialises volumetric video content creation. He received the IEEE ICME Star Innovator Award 2020 for his contributions to volumetric video content creation.
https://v-sense.scss.tcd.ie
https://volograms.com
Contact Person: Frédéric Dufaux