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Faculty Profiles

David Kriegman

Professor, Computer Science and Engineering



Computer vision, computer graphics, face recognition and vision-guided robotics.

Professor Kriegman is one of the most widely cited experts on the subject of face recognition, a crucial component of vision-based security systems for human-computer interaction as well as homeland security purposes. In object recognition, Kriegman revolutionized the field with his work on the geometry of curved surfaces to recognize objects from their occluding contours, silhouettes and aspects. For his research on recognizing objects under illumination extremes and for reconstructing surface shape from lighting variation, he won Best Paper awards in the U.S. and Europe. In turn, he has introduced new methods to render photorealistic images through image-based modeling of surface reflectance. Kriegman has adapted his approach to face and object recognition to mobile robot navigation and exploration using visual landmarks. Other research projects have included shape representation, robot planning, electron microscopy, human-computer interaction, human visual perception, and ubiquitous computing. Kriegman's new method for reconstructing the shape of surfaces with complex reflectance, named Helmholtz Reciprocity Stereopsis, was jointly developed with Peter Belhumeur at Columbia and Todd Zickler at Yale, and it will be featured in the October 2002 issue of the International Journal of Computer Vision.

Capsule Bio:
David Kriegman joins the UCSD faculty in September 2002, after four years of teaching at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was affiliated with the Beckman Institute. Prior to UIUC, he taught at Yale University from 1990 to 1998, and was a visiting professor at Caltech in the summers of 1993-94. Kriegman received his Ph.D. in 1989 from Stanford University. He won a prestigious NSF Young Investigator Award in 1992. Kriegman is currently the Associate Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence and an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation. A senior member of IEEE, he holds four provisional or pending patents, and authored over 100 publications.

Selected Publications:

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