REU Site: Research Experience for Undergraduates in Computer Vision

The University Of Central Florida Board Of Trustees, Orlando FL

Investigators

Abstract

This project is a continuation of a Research Experience for Undergraduates site in Computer Vision which has operated successfully at the University of Central Florida for the past twenty-one years. Approximately two hundred and ten undergraduate students from forty-three institutions all over the country have participated in this program over the years. The research focus area is Computer Vision. The current proposal is to have 10 participants per year, for three years. Each year, students will participate in a 12-week duration full-time Summer program. From lessons learned in prior years, the proposed model includes round-the-clock mentoring by a team that includes a professor, and a post-doctoral fellow or a graduate student; a streamlined short course that lets participants start their research projects sooner; and daily meetings with mentors to plan activities throughout the day. Participants take the short course, match themselves to a project topic that they most desire, and spend sufficient time in focused research. They then can opt for follow-through over the year by working with the professors to write a technical report on their project, to prepare for the GREs and to apply to graduate programs. In past years, a substantial fraction of our REU participants have been able to prepare a paper for submission to a refereed conference, have the paper accepted and then attend the conference to present the paper. The site is Co-funded by the Department of Defense in partnership with the NSF REU program. Intellectual Merit: Development of new algorithms for solving scientific problems in learning scene models, super-resolution enhancement, object detection, tracking, activity and event recognition. Both theory and practice is involved with an interest in mathematical modeling and analysis of difficult vision problems and developing algorithms, while at the same time building real systems for demonstrating those solutions in real life situations. Broader Impacts: The project will contribute to preparing a work force of young scientists in order to maintain America's previously-held strategic position of command in Science and Engineering. Participants will be trained in Computer Vision, in particular they will learn fundamentals of image science and vision, which plays an important role in security/surveillance, gaming, entertainment, healthcare, defense, and manufacturing. Through this project we will able to provide opportunities to a diverse group of undergraduates, many from predominantly undergraduate institutions, to spend a summer with a highly successful research group. This model for REU will be disseminated among other Schools.