Steered Mixture-of-Experts for Image-Based Virtual Reality

Abstract

Steered Mixture-of-Experts (SMoE) has been introduced as an entirely novel framework representing multidimensional images with applications in image approximation, description, and coding. In this talk, they will be talking about SMoE as an image-based technique for cinematographic virtual reality, i.e. video in which you can look around and walk around. First, they will start off with extending SMoE to 4-D light fields. Secondly, they will discuss our ongoing research to approximate the entire plenoptic function.

Short Bio

Professor Thomas Sikora is professor and director of the Communication Systems Group (in German: Fachgebiet Nachrichtenübertragung) at Technische Universität Berlin, Germany. He received the Dipl.-Ing. and Dr.-Ing. degrees in electrical engineering from Bremen University, Bremen, Germany, in 1985 and 1989, respectively. In 1990, he joined Siemens Ltd. and Monash University, Melbourne, Australia, as a Project Leader responsible for video compression research activities in the Australian Universal Broadband Video Codec consortium. Between 1994 and 2001, he was the Director of the Interactive Media Department, Heinrich Hertz Institute (HHI) Berlin GmbH, Germany. Professor Sikora is co-founder of 2SK Media Technologies and Vis-a-Pix GmbH, two Berlin-based start-up companies involved in research and development of audio and video signal processing and compression technology.

Dr. Ruben Verhack received his M.Sc in Engineering: Computer Science at Ghent University, Belgium in 2012. He started working as a researcher in 2012 at Technische Universität Berlin, Communication Systems Group. In 2013, he started his double PhD at IDLab (UGent – imec) and Communication Systems Group (TU Berlin). He received several awards, including the Highly Commended Student paper award at the Picture Coding Symposium ’15, and the Best Student Paper award at ICME 2017.

Venue