CENTRE FOR VISUAL INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

The Centre for Visual Information Technology (CVIT) was established with the mission to do fundamental and applied research in the area of Visual Information Processing, including Image Processing, Computer Vision, Computer Graphics, Multimedia, and Virtual Reality.

It has full time faculty members, research scientists, research associates, PhD, Post-Graduage and Undergraduate (Honours) students working on diverse aspects of visual information processing. The team consists of approximately 50 individuals.

CVIT believes in real-life use of its research outcomes and technologies. Demonstration of its capabilities in the form of laboratory systems, distribution of data and other resources, product development using advanced visual technologies, technology transfer for accessibility to wider population etc., are give high priority at CVIT.

The current research focus of CVIT consists of

• Document Image Analysis, Image Databases and Digital Libraries
• Computer Vision, Pattern Recognition, Stereo and Video Processing
• Biometrics, Soft Computing, Parallel Computing
• Computer Graphics, Virtual Reality and Image Based Rendering

Stereo vision attempts to recover 3D structure of the scene from images. A fundamental problem in stereo is the computation of pixel correspondences. Several schemes for pixel correspondence, which integrate different types of information present in the image, have been devised. A novel strategy to improve the correspondence by adaptively weighing various supports to compute the correspondence has been developed. The supports can be multiple windows, multi-base line images or multiple features. The feature integration scheme is being extended to other image processing applications such as document image analysis, dynamic video processing, video-stereo, etc.

A flexible scheme for indexing and retrieval has been developed. Existing algorithms for indexing image databases are often tuned to a specific application. With the emergence of large and diverse image collections, one could easily come across new and challenging requirements. With new low cost storage devices, digital libraries are becoming more and more popular. Automatic indexing and retrieval from this collection is being investigated. A typical application will be to index TV news clips for better retrieval at latter point of time. Audio-visual clues are employed for segmentation. Soft computing tools will be used in the feature extraction phase.

Document image analysis research requires a closer look in the Indian context. Indian languages have different scripts and their mixed presence makes the problem of analysis and recognition of Indian language documents difficult. Work on segmentation and recognition of Indian languages in document pages and Internet images and online character recognition system for Indian languages has commenced. The applications can be for indexing document pages or web images, understanding documents or effective compression of the documents. Character recognition is another important problem in this domain.

Virtual Reality is an investment intensive area. A low-cost model for VR that uses inexpensive PCs connected to an expensive, central client for full VR experience, using Image Based Rendering techniques at the client's end is under development. Work on novel representation schemes suitable for large virtual environments is in progress. This scheme represents the world as a number of visibility-limited models, and not as a single global model. Applications of visualization research can be many. Scientific data visualization has applications in meteorology, oceanography, molecular chemistry, etc. Tools for effective visualization in collaboration with the scientific community using graphics and virtual reality are being developed.

Product development using advanced technologies from image processing, computer vision, graphics, etc, is also being done. These could be for video indexing, segmentation and retrieval, biometric systems, online handwriting recognition for Indian languages, etc.

Events

The Indian conference on Computer Vision, Graphics and Image Processing (ICVGIP) 2000 was organised by CVIT and CAIR, DRDO. The Asian Conference on Computer Vision (ACCV) 2006, Hyderabad, India, will be organised by CVIT in January.