Blog Entry

SCPV, Boston wrap-up

I'm now sitting in my friends' place in Jersey City, somehow oddly awake after an exhausting series of days. I've been in Boston, attending an amazing symposium on "Computational Photography and Video":http://photo.csail.mit.edu/ hosted by MIT. It brought together the top 200 researchers in computer graphics, computer vision, image processing, and some cutting edge photographers to discuss where this intersection of computers and cameras is going.

Some of the more established names in this new field made presentations on work they had done to date, and people spent a good deal of time just talking with one another and brainstorming. It was a 3 day whirlwind which left my brain hurting every evening from the amount of knowledge it'd tried to absorb.

Beyond reports on state of the art techniques, a lot of time was dedicated to thinking about what exactly taking a photograph is doing. Both in theoretical terms of capturing very complex scenes, and thinking what of the traditional concepts of camera and image will continue to apply in the future. One thing that struck me was that there were almost as many ideas about what conputational photography means as there were people in attendance. Just some of the interpretations and variants present were:

• Digital photography - image processing applied to make "better" images
• Computational photography - processing captured images to make "new" images
• Computational imaging - creative types of lenses, optics and uses to produce "new" images
• Computational sensors - better CCD and CMOS that produce "smarter" pixels, meaning less work afterwards to produce the desired image
• Computational illumination - Sharing parts of the previous 4, with an emphasis on creating special lighting to tell more about the scene

I'm still digesting all of my notes from it (I'm already out of practice of sitting in an auditorium and scribbling for 8 hours a day). I'll wait for the slides to make it online before I really go in depth with some of the more interesting stuff to make sure that my understanding was complete. But, in the mean time, here are some bullet points on things that caught me:

• The scene is this huge and complex thing with many dimensions of data beyond the 3 that you normally think of. A conventional camera lens is very restrictive in how you can interact with the scene. New types of optics that completely do away with the lens as you know it are being investigated.
• Computation can happen before the image is recorded to memory, making some current problems potentially much less troublesome.
• Mice are cheaper than rats. (Yes, this does deal with computational photography, but I'll leave you guessing for now)
• Sensors have come a long way, but the huge explosion the last 6 years has seen in image quality won't last much longer. Sensors will continue to increase in quality and size, but at a much slower pace that one is used to seeing from electronics in general. The laws of physics weight much heavier on their shoulders.
• Sometimes it's better to solve hard problems poorly. In certain circumstances, doing so can allow you much more freedom to get better results later on.

I think that wraps up what I can get my head around at the moment. I'll be in New York City until Saturday evening before heading on to Washington DC until June 2nd.