CS 143 Introduction to Computer Vision

Fall 2013, MWF 1:00 to 1:50, Kasser House, Foxboro

Auditorium
Instructor: James Hays
TAs: Hari Narayanan (HTA), Libin "Geoffrey" Sun, Greg Yauney, Bryce
Aebi, Charles Yeh, and Kurt Spindler.

Course Description
Course Catalog Entry

How can computers understand the visual world of humans? This course treats
vision as a process of inference from noisy and uncertain data and emphasizes
probabilistic, statistical, data-driven approaches. Topics include image processing;
segmentation, grouping, and boundary detection; recognition and detection; motion
estimation and structure from motion. This offering of CS 143 will emphasize the
core vision tasks of scene understanding and recognition. We will train and evaluate
classifiers to recognize various visual phenomena.
The course will consist of five programming projects and two written quizzes. This
course satisfies the graduate A.I area requirement.

Prerequisites
This course requires programming experience as well as linear algebra, basic
calculus, and basic probability. Previous knowledge of visual computing will be
helpful. The following courses (or equivalent courses at other institutions) are helpful
prerequisites:

CS 123, Introduction to Computer Graphics

CS 129, Computational Photography

CS 195-F, Introduction to Machine Learning

Some of the course topics overlap with these related courses, but none of the
assignments will.

Assignments

Winning projects

All Results

Image Filtering and

Hybrid images

Yipin Zhou, Tuo Shao,

Sarah Parker

Project 1
results

Local Feature
Matching

Tuo Shao, Junzhe Xu,

Patsorn Sangkloy

Project 2
results

Scene Recognition
with Bag of Words

Chun-Che Wang, Patsorn

Sangkloy,
Junzhe Xu, Michael Wang

Project 3
results

Face Detection with a

Sliding Window

Jake Ellis, Jincheng Li,

Patsorn Sangkloy, Yipin
Zhou,

Project 4
results

Boundary Detection
with Sketch Tokens

Junzhe Xu, Sonia Phene,

Chun-Che Wang,
Valay Shah, Yun Miao

Project 5
results

It is strongly recommended that all projects be completed in Matlab. All starter code
will be provided for Matlab. Students may implement projects through other means
but it will generally be more difficult.

Textbook
Readings will be assigned in "Computer Vision: Algorithms and
Applications" by Richard Szeliski. The book is available for free online or
available for purchase.

Grading
Your final grade will be made up from

80% 5 programming projects

20% 2 written quizzes

You will lose 10% each day for late projects. However, you have three "late days" for
the whole course. That is to say, the first 24 hours after the due date and time counts
as 1 day, up to 48 hours is two and 72 for the third late day. This will not be reflected

in the initial grade reports for your assignment, but they will be factored in and
distributed at the end of the semester so that you get the most points possible.

Important Links:

Collaboration Policy

Matlab Tutorial

Contact Info and Office Hours:

You can contact the professor or TA staff with any of the following:

James: hays[at]cs.brown.edu

HTA and Professor: cs143headtas[at]cs.brown.edu

TAs and Professor: cs143tas[at]cs.brown.edu

Office Hours

James (hays), Monday and Friday, 2:00-3:00, CIT 375.

Geoff (lbsun), Wednesday, 3:00-5:00, CIT 311.

Hari (hnarayan), Sunday 4:00-6:00, CIT 219.

Charles (ccyeh), Monday 6:00-8:00, CIT 219.

Greg (gyauney), Monday 8:00-10:00, CIT 219.

Kurt (kspindle), Tuesday 6:00-8:00, CIT 219.

Bryce (baebi), Thursday 6:00-8:00, CIT 219.

Tentative Syllabus
Class
Date

Topic

Slides

Reading

W, Sept 4

Introduction to computer
vision

.ppt, .pdf

Szeliski 1

Projects

Image Formation and Filtering

F, Sep 6

Cameras and optics

.ppt, .pdf

Szeliski 2.1,
especially
2.1.5

Project 1
out

M, Sep 9

Light and color

.ppt, .pdf

Szeliski 2.2
and 2.3

W, Sep 11

Image filtering

.ppt, .pdf

Szeliski 3.2

F, Sep 13

Thinking in frequency

.ppt, .pdf

Szeliski 3.4

M, Sep 16

Image pyramids and

applications

.ppt, .pdf

Szeliski 3.5.2
and 8.1.1

Feature Detection and Matching

W, Sep
18

Edge detection

.ppt, .pdf

Szeliski 4.2

F, Sep 20

Interest points and

corners

.ppt, .pdf

Szeliski 4.1.1

Project 1
due

M, Sept
23

Local image features

.ppt, .pdf

Szeliski 4.1.2

Project 2
out

W, Sept
25

Feature matching and

hough transform

.ppt, .pdf

Szeliski 4.1.3
and 4.3.2

F, Sept
27

Model fitting and

RANSAC

.ppt, .pdf

Szeliski 6.1

Multiple Views and Motion

M, Sept
30

Stereo

.ppt, .pdf

Szeliski 11

W, Oct 2

Epipolar Geometry and

Structure from Motion

.ppt, .pdf

Szeliski 7

F, Oct 4

Feature Tracking and

Optical Flow

.ppt, .pdf

Szeliski 8.1
and 8.4

Machine Learning Crash Course

M, Oct 7

Machine learning intro

and clustering

.ppt, .pdf

Szeliski 5.3

W, Oct 9

Machine learning:
clustering continued

.ppt, .pdf

Szeliski 5.3

F, Oct 11

Machine learning:
classification

.ppt, .pdf

M, Oct 14

No classes

W, Oct 16

Quiz 1
Recognition

Project 2
due
Project 3
out

F, Oct 18

Recognition overview and

bag of features

.ppt, .pdf

Szeliski 14

M, Oct 21

Large-scale instance
recognition

.ppt, .pdf

Szeliski 14.3.2

W, Oct
23

Detection with sliding

windows: Viola Jones

.ppt, .pdf

Szeliski 14.1

F, Oct 25

Detection continued and

Quiz 1 discussion

See above

Szeliski 14.2

M, Oct
28

Scene recognition with

SUN database

.ppt, .pdf

W, Oct
30

Mixture of Gaussians and

advanced feature
encoding

.ppt, .pdf

F, Nov 1

Modern object detection

.ppt, .pdf

Szeliski 14.1

M, Nov 4

Internet scale vision, pt 1

.ppt, .pdf

Szeliski 14.5

Project 4
out

W, Nov 6

Internet scale vision, pt 2

.ppt, .pdf

F, Nov 8

Guest lecture: Carl

Vondrick, HOGgles

Project page

M, Nov 11

Human computation and

crowdsourcing

.ppt, .pdf

W, Nov
13

Attributes and more

crowdsourcing

.ppt, .pdf

F, Nov 15

Sketch Recognition and

more crowdsourcing

.ppt, .pdf

M, Nov
18

Modern boundary
detection and Pb

.ppt, .pdf

Szeliski 4.2

Project 4
due

W, Nov
20

Modern boundary
detection and sketch
tokens

.ppt, .pdf,
gPb, Sketch
Tokens

Szeliski 4.2

F, Nov 22

Guest lecture: Sobhan

Parizi, Deformable Part
Models

M, Nov
25

Project 5 introduction

.ppt, .pdf

Szeliski 5.5

W, Nov
27

No classes

Project 3
Due

Project 5
out

F, Nov 29

No classes

M, Dec 2

Context and Spatial

Layout

.ppt, .pdf

W, Dec 4

Context and Scene

parsing

.ppt, .pdf

F, Dec 6

Quiz 2

M, Dec 9

No classes

W, Dec 11

No classes

S, Dec 14,
2:00 PM

Exam Period - not used

Project 5
due

Acknowledgements
The materials from this class rely significantly on slides prepared by other
instructors, especially Derek Hoiem and Svetlana Lazebnik. Each slide set and
assignment contains acknowledgements. Feel free to use these slides for academic or
research purposes, but please maintain all acknowledgements.

Previous Versions of Course

The 2011 offering of CS 143 can be found here

Michael Black's 2009 offering of CS 143 can be found here