An import­ant event in the ETH com­mu­nity are the inau­gu­ral lec­tures. Every newly appoin­ted pro­fes­sor has the duty to pre­sent his field of rese­arch and his per­son to the ETH com­mu­nity. Alre­ady in the opening words it became clear why Marc Polle­feys had been cho­sen for an ETH pro­fes­sor­ship. Aged 36, he has publis­hed about 90 papers, recei­ved nume­rous pri­ces, and is con­stantly invi­ted in the edi­to­rial board of jour­nals and pro­gram board of con­fe­ren­ces. His career sta­ti­ons are quite typi­cal, star­ting in Bel­gium with PhD and Post­Doc, moving to Cha­pel Hill, USA as assis­tant and asso­ciate pro­fes­sor, and com­ing to ETH in 2007. It seems that most suc­cess­ful sci­en­tists at one point had to go over the Atlan­tic to com­pile the merits, which are necessary for being appoin­ted as ETH professor.

The topic of the pre­sen­ta­tion was Com­pu­ta­tio­nal 3D Pho­to­gra­phy – Extrac­ting Shape, Motion, and Appearance from Images. For me it was quite striking what is pos­si­ble in this area. Just take your cam­cor­der, make a shaky video of a sta­tic object (an anci­ent relief for example), feed that into a com­pu­ter, and get a 3D model of the whole thing. What looked so easy in his pre­sen­ta­tion, invol­ves a lot of image pro­ces­sing algo­rithms. First, you have to com­pute the posi­tion of the camera in selec­ted video shots. That pro­vi­ded, you have to detect cha­rac­te­ristic points in the image, which you can locate in mul­ti­ple shots and com­pute the 3D position.

The rese­arch of Marc Polle­feys focus­sed on making this pro­cess more effi­ci­ent and apply it to a new domain of pro­blems. One was to deve­lop 3D models of ent­ire city areas (advo­ca­ted by Google) by dri­ving with video-​​equipped cars through them, ano­ther to extend it to moving objects, in par­ti­cu­lar humans.

Over­all, I was impres­sed by the pos­si­bi­li­ties. Rhe­to­ri­cally the pre­sen­ta­tion was good, what is not com­mon for such lectures.

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