REU Site: NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates in Computer Vision

The University Of Central Florida Board Of Trustees, Orlando FL

Investigators

Abstract

This project represents 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-seven years. Approximately two hundred and seventy undergraduate students from sixty five institutions all over the country have participated in this program over the years. Each year, students will participate in a 12-week duration full-time Summer program. In past years, a substantial fraction of 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 program will build these skills in participants: ability to write complex computer programs; ability to communicate orally about a research problem; ability to present one's project via technology such as PowerPoint; ability to do a poster presentation about the project, and answer questions; ability to think about computer vision issues in real life problems; ability to do initial reading of a research paper in computer vision; ability to contribute to discussion of a vision problem; and ability to embark on applying to graduate school. The research emphasizes development of new algorithms for solving scientific problems in visual geo-localization and segmentation, object detection, multi-target tracking, activity and event recognition. It advances both theory and practice; 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. The educational model employed by this site includes round-the-clock mentoring by a team that includes a professor and a graduate student; a streamlined short course that lets participants start their research projects sooner; daily meetings with mentors to plan activities throughout the day; training in MatLab for quick turnaround of research ideas. Participants take the short course on fundamentals of computer vision, match themselves to a project topic that they most desire, and spend sufficient time in focused research. Some possible research projects include: Location-Aware Semantic Segmentation; Multi-target Tracking with Social Behavior, Model, Human Action Recognition etc. After summer, students 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.