Abstract: For many years, computer vision researchers have worked hard chasing the illusive goals such as “can the robot find a boy in the scene” or “can your vision system automatically segment the cat from the background”. These tasks require a lot of prior knowledge and contextual information. How to incorporate prior knowledge and contextual information into vision systems, however, is very challenging. In this talk, we propose that many difficult vision tasks can only be solved with interactive vision systems, by combining powerful and real-time vision techniques with intuitive and clever user interfaces. I will show two interactive vision systems we developed recently, Lazy Snapping (Siggraph 2004) and Image Completion (Siggraph 2005), where Lazy Snapping cuts out an object with solid boundary using graph cut, while Image Completion recovers unknown region with belief propagation. A key element in designing such interactive systems is how we model the user’s intention using conditional probability (context) and likelihood associated with user interactions. Given how ill-posed most image understanding problems are, I am convinced that interactive computer vision is the paradigm we should focus today’s vision research on.

I will also give a quick overview of Microsoft Research Asia, “the world’s hottest computer lab” by MIT Technology Review (June 2004). I will review our activities in basic research, technology transfer, product incubation, university relations and internship program.

Short Bio: Dr. Shum is a Distinguished Engineer of Microsoft Corporation. He received his Ph.D. in robotics from the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University. After he graduated, he worked as a researcher at Microsoft Research Redmond. In 1999, he moved to Microsoft Research Asia (Beijing, China) where he is currently the Managing Director. His research interests include computer vision, graphics, human computer interaction, statistical learning and robotics. He is on the editorial boards for IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI), and International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV). He is the Program Co-Chair of Eleventh International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV 2007 Brazil). He is a Fellow of IEEE and a Fellow of ACM.