Title: 3D Capture, Compression, and Signal Processing on Meshes

Abstract: Several closely related methods have been proposed in recent years to smooth, denoise, edit, compress, transmit, and animate very large polygon meshes, based on topological and combinatorial methods, signal processing techniques, constrained energy minimization, and the solution of diffusion differential equations.  In particular, polygon models, which are used in most graphics applications, require considerable amounts of storage, even when they only approximate precise shapes with limited accuracy.  To support internet access to 3D models of complex virtual environments or assemblies for electronic shopping, collaborative CAD, multi-player video games, scientific visualization, representations of 3D shapes must be compressed by several orders of magnitude.  In this talk I will first give a short overview of my recent projects, including the scanning of Michelangelo's Florentine Pieta, the implementation of a 3D photography system in a digital camera, and my approach to signal processing on meshes.  Then I will describe the state of the art in schemes for lossy and loss-less compression of triangle and polygonal meshes, including progressive approaches, focusing on my contributions, the status of standardization efforts such as MPEG-4 and open problems.

Biography:  Dr. Gabriel Taubin is a Research Staff Member at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. He joined IBM Research in 1990 as a member of the Exploratory Computer Vision group. From 1996 to 2000 he was Manager of the Visual and Geometric Computing Group. He spent the academic year 2000-2001 on Sabbatical at CalTech, as Visiting Professor of Electrical Engineering. Dr. Taubin holds a "Licenciado en Ciencias Matematicas" degree (MSc. in Pure Mathematics) from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island.  His main research interests fall into the following disciplines: Applied Computational Geometry, Computer Graphics, Geometric Modeling, and Computer Vision.  He has been elected IEEE Fellow "for contributions to the development of three-dimensional geometry compression technology and multimedia standards."