~~Speaker: Rana Hanocka, 
M.Sc. student under the supervision of Prof. Nahum Kiryati

Wednesday, December 16th, 2015 at 15:30
Room 011, Kitot Bldg., Faculty of Engineering

Blind Image Deblurring Via Residual Blur Elimination

Abstract

We present a novel progressive framework for blind image restoration. Common blind restoration schemes first estimate the blur kernel, then employ non-blind deblurring. However, despite recent progress, the accuracy of PSF estimation is limited. Furthermore, the outcome of non-blind deblurring is highly sensitive to errors in the assumed PSF. Therefore, high quality blind deblurring has remained a major challenge. We suggest an iterative progressive restoration scheme, in which the imperfectly deblurred output of the current iteration is fed back as input to the next iteration. The kernel representing the residual blur is then estimated, and used to drive the non-blind restoration component, leading to finer deblurring. Our framework is extremely modular. Our proposed method is able to adapt to various kernel estimation and non-blind deblurring modules, including state-of-the-art art regularizers for the image and the PSF. A particularly interesting combination is the Mumford & Shah piecewise-smooth image model and the sparse PSF prior. Previous works that used Mumford & Shah image regularization were either limited to non-blind deblurring or semi-blind deblurring assuming a parametric kernel known up to an unknown parameter. Experimental results demonstrate rapid convergence, and excellent performance on a wide variety of blurred images.

~~(The talk will be given in English)

Speaker:  Prof. Gal A. Kaminka
                  Computer Science Department & Gonda Brain Research Center, Bar Ilan University

Sunday, November 22nd, 2015
15:00 - 16:00
Room 011, Kitot Bldg., Faculty of Engineering
No robot is an island, no team an archipelago
Abstract
We live in opportune times. The centuries-old dreams of creating intelligent, programmable automatons—robots—are becoming reality. Recent years are seeing dramatically growing interest in robotics, by scientists and practitioners alike. Robots—from the molecular scale to tank-size—seem to appear everywhere: in production lines, in the battlefield, in hospitals, in warehouses, in homes, in fields; on the ground, on water, and in the air.
In this talk, I argue that to accelerate and maximize the impact of robotics, robots should operate in teams, rather than in isolation. Moreover, I argue that effective robot teams must dynamically adjust their teamwork, instead of relying on rigid pre-planned coordination schemes. This is not a mere philosophical argument: I will present algorithms, data structures, and computational techniques for facilitating such teamwork, and discuss analytical guarantees and empirical results that demonstrate the effectiveness of these contributions in a variety of cooperative robot teams, from the molecular to the vehicle scale; robot teams which move in formations, explore urban areas, play soccer, and patrol Israel's borders.
As a final note, I will also argue that what is true for robots, is true for roboticists. Accelerating the impact of robotics requires leaving behind rigid disciplinary bounds and pre-established division of labor within academic circles and in practice. Instead, roboticists should embrace multi-discplinary collaborations, opening up to biology, psychology, economics, and sociology as sources of inspiration and targets of influence.

About the speaker: 
Gal A. Kaminka is a professor at the computer science department and the brain sciences research center, at Bar Ilan University (Israel), where he chairs the Bar Ilan University Robotics Consortium, and his MAVERICK research group. His research expertise includes multi-agent and multi-robot systems, teamwork and coordination, behavior and plan recognition, and modeling social behavior. He received his PhD from the University of Southern California (2000), spent time as a post-doctorate fellow at Carnegie Mellon University (until 2002), and a year as a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2012).  Prof. Kaminka was awarded an IBM faculty award and top places at international robotics competitions. He served as the program chair of the 2008 Israeli Conference on Robotics, and the program co-chair of the 2010 Int'l Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS). He has served on the international executive bodies of IFAAMAS (International Foundation of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems), the RoboCup Federation, and AAAI (Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence). He is the author or co-author of over 150 publications and 7 patents. He is the 2013 recipient of the Israeli national Landau Prize in exact sciences.