CS 143 Introduction to Computer Vision
Fall 2013, MWF 1:00 to 1:50, Kasser House, Foxboro
Auditorium
Instructor: James Hays
TAs: Hari Narayanan (HTA), Libin "Geoffrey" Sun, Greg Yauney, Bryce
Aebi, Charles Yeh, and Kurt Spindler.
Course Description
Course Catalog Entry
How can computers understand the visual world of humans? This course treats
vision as a process of inference from noisy and uncertain data and emphasizes
probabilistic, statistical, data-driven approaches. Topics include image processing;
segmentation, grouping, and boundary detection; recognition and detection; motion
estimation and structure from motion. This offering of CS 143 will emphasize the
core vision tasks of scene understanding and recognition. We will train and evaluate
classifiers to recognize various visual phenomena.
The course will consist of five programming projects and two written quizzes. This
course satisfies the graduate A.I area requirement.
Prerequisites
This course requires programming experience as well as linear algebra, basic
calculus, and basic probability. Previous knowledge of visual computing will be
helpful. The following courses (or equivalent courses at other institutions) are helpful
prerequisites:
CS 123, Introduction to Computer Graphics
CS 129, Computational Photography
CS 195-F, Introduction to Machine Learning
Some of the course topics overlap with these related courses, but none of the
assignments will.
Assignments
Winning projects
All Results
Image Filtering and
Hybrid images
Yipin Zhou, Tuo Shao,
Sarah Parker
Project 1
results
Local Feature
Matching
Tuo Shao, Junzhe Xu,
Patsorn Sangkloy
Project 2
results
Scene Recognition
with Bag of Words
Chun-Che Wang, Patsorn
Sangkloy,
Junzhe Xu, Michael Wang
Project 3
results
Face Detection with a
Sliding Window
Jake Ellis, Jincheng Li,
Patsorn Sangkloy, Yipin
Zhou,
Project 4
results
Boundary Detection
with Sketch Tokens
Junzhe Xu, Sonia Phene,
Chun-Che Wang,
Valay Shah, Yun Miao
Project 5
results
It is strongly recommended that all projects be completed in Matlab. All starter code
will be provided for Matlab. Students may implement projects through other means
but it will generally be more difficult.
Textbook
Readings will be assigned in "Computer Vision: Algorithms and
Applications" by Richard Szeliski. The book is available for free online or
available for purchase.
Grading
Your final grade will be made up from
80% 5 programming projects
20% 2 written quizzes
You will lose 10% each day for late projects. However, you have three "late days" for
the whole course. That is to say, the first 24 hours after the due date and time counts
as 1 day, up to 48 hours is two and 72 for the third late day. This will not be reflected
in the initial grade reports for your assignment, but they will be factored in and
distributed at the end of the semester so that you get the most points possible.
Important Links:
Collaboration Policy
Matlab Tutorial
Contact Info and Office Hours:
You can contact the professor or TA staff with any of the following:
James: hays[at]cs.brown.edu
HTA and Professor: cs143headtas[at]cs.brown.edu
TAs and Professor: cs143tas[at]cs.brown.edu
Office Hours
James (hays), Monday and Friday, 2:00-3:00, CIT 375.
Geoff (lbsun), Wednesday, 3:00-5:00, CIT 311.
Hari (hnarayan), Sunday 4:00-6:00, CIT 219.
Charles (ccyeh), Monday 6:00-8:00, CIT 219.
Greg (gyauney), Monday 8:00-10:00, CIT 219.
Kurt (kspindle), Tuesday 6:00-8:00, CIT 219.
Bryce (baebi), Thursday 6:00-8:00, CIT 219.
Tentative Syllabus
Class
Date
Topic
Slides
Reading
W, Sept 4
Introduction to computer
vision
.ppt, .pdf
Szeliski 1
Projects
Image Formation and Filtering
F, Sep 6
Cameras and optics
.ppt, .pdf
Szeliski 2.1,
especially
2.1.5
Project 1
out
M, Sep 9
Light and color
.ppt, .pdf
Szeliski 2.2
and 2.3
W, Sep 11
Image filtering
.ppt, .pdf
Szeliski 3.2
F, Sep 13
Thinking in frequency
.ppt, .pdf
Szeliski 3.4
M, Sep 16
Image pyramids and
applications
.ppt, .pdf
Szeliski 3.5.2
and 8.1.1
Feature Detection and Matching
W, Sep
18
Edge detection
.ppt, .pdf
Szeliski 4.2
F, Sep 20
Interest points and
corners
.ppt, .pdf
Szeliski 4.1.1
Project 1
due
M, Sept
23
Local image features
.ppt, .pdf
Szeliski 4.1.2
Project 2
out
W, Sept
25
Feature matching and
hough transform
.ppt, .pdf
Szeliski 4.1.3
and 4.3.2
F, Sept
27
Model fitting and
RANSAC
.ppt, .pdf
Szeliski 6.1
Multiple Views and Motion
M, Sept
30
Stereo
.ppt, .pdf
Szeliski 11
W, Oct 2
Epipolar Geometry and
Structure from Motion
.ppt, .pdf
Szeliski 7
F, Oct 4
Feature Tracking and
Optical Flow
.ppt, .pdf
Szeliski 8.1
and 8.4
Machine Learning Crash Course
M, Oct 7
Machine learning intro
and clustering
.ppt, .pdf
Szeliski 5.3
W, Oct 9
Machine learning:
clustering continued
.ppt, .pdf
Szeliski 5.3
F, Oct 11
Machine learning:
classification
.ppt, .pdf
M, Oct 14
No classes
W, Oct 16
Quiz 1
Recognition
Project 2
due
Project 3
out
F, Oct 18
Recognition overview and
bag of features
.ppt, .pdf
Szeliski 14
M, Oct 21
Large-scale instance
recognition
.ppt, .pdf
Szeliski 14.3.2
W, Oct
23
Detection with sliding
windows: Viola Jones
.ppt, .pdf
Szeliski 14.1
F, Oct 25
Detection continued and
Quiz 1 discussion
See above
Szeliski 14.2
M, Oct
28
Scene recognition with
SUN database
.ppt, .pdf
W, Oct
30
Mixture of Gaussians and
advanced feature
encoding
.ppt, .pdf
F, Nov 1
Modern object detection
.ppt, .pdf
Szeliski 14.1
M, Nov 4
Internet scale vision, pt 1
.ppt, .pdf
Szeliski 14.5
Project 4
out
W, Nov 6
Internet scale vision, pt 2
.ppt, .pdf
F, Nov 8
Guest lecture: Carl
Vondrick, HOGgles
Project page
M, Nov 11
Human computation and
crowdsourcing
.ppt, .pdf
W, Nov
13
Attributes and more
crowdsourcing
.ppt, .pdf
F, Nov 15
Sketch Recognition and
more crowdsourcing
.ppt, .pdf
M, Nov
18
Modern boundary
detection and Pb
.ppt, .pdf
Szeliski 4.2
Project 4
due
W, Nov
20
Modern boundary
detection and sketch
tokens
.ppt, .pdf,
gPb, Sketch
Tokens
Szeliski 4.2
F, Nov 22
Guest lecture: Sobhan
Parizi, Deformable Part
Models
M, Nov
25
Project 5 introduction
.ppt, .pdf
Szeliski 5.5
W, Nov
27
No classes
Project 3
Due
Project 5
out
F, Nov 29
No classes
M, Dec 2
Context and Spatial
Layout
.ppt, .pdf
W, Dec 4
Context and Scene
parsing
.ppt, .pdf
F, Dec 6
Quiz 2
M, Dec 9
No classes
W, Dec 11
No classes
S, Dec 14,
2:00 PM
Exam Period - not used
Project 5
due
Acknowledgements
The materials from this class rely significantly on slides prepared by other
instructors, especially Derek Hoiem and Svetlana Lazebnik. Each slide set and
assignment contains acknowledgements. Feel free to use these slides for academic or
research purposes, but please maintain all acknowledgements.
Previous Versions of Course
The 2011 offering of CS 143 can be found here
Michael Black's 2009 offering of CS 143 can be found here
