Abstract: Vision Geometry is the are of Computer Vision that deals with computing the geometry of the 3D world from sequences of images. It grew out of Photogrammetry, a field that goes back at least to the start of the 20th century. In the 1990s this field was transformed by the application of methods of Projective Geometry, leading to many new algorithms and deployment of the new methods in a wide variety of applications.

The algorithmic basis for Vision Geometry still ultimately relied on a technique called "bundle adjustment", involving iterative refinement of initial solutions by Newton or Gauss-Newton methods. These had the disadvantage of often finding local rather than global minima.

Recent work has focussed on applying different optimization techniques, particularly Convex Optimization techniques to attempt to find guaranteed global solutions to these problems. I will talk about progress in this area, through the use of methods such as Second Order Cone Programming, branch-and-bound fractional programming and semi-definite programming.

EDUCATION:

University of Toronto, Canada PhD Mathematics, 1976, MSc 1972

Stanford University, MSc Computer Science, 1985

Australian National University, BSc, 1971

EXPERIENCE:

Professor Richard Hartley is a member of the Vision Science, Technology and Applications Program in NICTA; from 2003 until 2006 he was the leader of this research group. This program seeks to apply method of Computer Vision and Sensor Technology in a range of real-world problems, ranging from motor-vehicle safety to improved methods of health care. To this end, the research program supports research projects in Intelligent Vehicles, Surveillance, Mobile Robotics and Medical Imaging.

In 2001, Professor Hartley returned from the USA to a position in the Department of Information Engineering at the Australian National University. Before that, he worked at the General Electric Research and Development Center in Schenectady New York from 1985 to 2001. During the period 1985-1988, he was involved in the design and implementation of Computer-Aided Design tools for electronic design and created a very successful design system called the Parsifal Silicon Compiler. In 1991 he was awarded GE's Dushman Award for this work.

He began work in Image Understanding and Scene Reconstruction for GE's Simulation and Control Systems Division. This division built large-scale flight-simulators. Dr. Hartley's projects in this area were in the construction of terrain models and texture mosaics from aerial and satellite imagery.

In 1991, he began an extended research effort in the area of applying geometric techniques to the analysis of video. This far-reaching research led to fundamental advances in maching-understanding of video, and opened up one of the most popular areas of Computer Vision research in the 1990s. The most visible outcome of this research was in automating the creation of special effects in the film entertainment industry. In 2000, he co-authored a book “Multiple View Geometry in Computer Vision” for Cambridge University Press, summarizing the previous decade’s research in this area. This has become one of the most popular research reference texts in Computer Vision.

He has authored over 100 papers in Photogrammetry, Computer Vision, Geometric Topology, Geometric Voting Theory, Computational Geometry and Computer-Aided Design, and holds 34 US patents.