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About Me I recently completed a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering at McGill University, under the supervision of Prof. M. Levine. I am interested in computer vision problems with real-world applications. During my Ph.D., I worked on object class recognition and 3D object detection. Before coming to McGill University, I completed my Bachelors and Masters in Mathematics and Computing at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. I am currently interested in working as a software developer, focused on innovative and intelligent technologies. You are most welcome to review my Résumé!
Ph.D. Thesis My Ph.D. thesis is entitled "Building a 3D Object Model in a Low Dimensional space for Object Detection". The main idea is to employ Locally Linear Embedding to represent the appearance of object parts in a low-dimensional space. The linear embedding technique is also used to model the class of background patterns. Given a novel image, features are classified as belonging to certain object parts or background. Objects are then localized based on applying a spatial consistency check to the hypothesized object parts. This technique has been used to detect objects in an arbitrary view from various classes including: face, bicycle, car, airplane, shoe, toaster, cell phone, etc. Click here for more details and results related to this work. My Ph.D. defense took place on May 13, 2009. My presentation is available here for you as well.
Research Project Before beginning my Ph.D. in September 2003, I worked as a Research Assistant for Prof. M. Levine on the topic of "Fully automated Face Recognition system invariant to illumination and head-pose". We employed a 3D Morphable model with a computer graphics simulation of projection for image formation. The illumination effects are modeled by a linear combination of harmonic images, which are computed analytically for a single image of a convex Lambertian object. The aim is to separate the imaging conditions (pose and illumination) from the shape and texture of the facial surface. The latter constitute a coding of the facial identity and is invariant for the same face across multitudes of illumination and viewpoint changes. To recover this coding for a novel 2D image, it is fitted to the 3D Morphable model in an Analysis-by-Synthesis fashion. Our approach followed Romdhani and Vetter's LiST algorithm. However, unlike the Phong model used there, the illumination model in our approach accounted for multiple lighting sources from any direction. Moreover, it did not require any prior information about any parameters and obtained their estimates automatically. For details, please see the technical report here.
Teaching Assistant I was the teaching assistant for the Image Processing course (ECSE - 529) taught by Prof. M. Levine every Fall semester from 2004-2008. Besides participating in designing assignments and quizzes and marking student reports, I particularly enjoyed discussions with students regarding the assignments and term projects. I also taught a few lectures each year.
Work Experience During my studies at I.I.T. Delhi, I had the opportunity to do two summer internships. I worked as a summer intern at Cisco systems, Bangalore from May-July 2000, wherein I was mainly involved in setting up the IP centric rack of Cisco gear. In the summer of 2001, I worked in the Graphics group at the Max-Planck Institute for informatik, in Saarbruecken, Germany. As part of a project on 3D scanning of an object, I wrote code to (i) capture image frames from a camera, (ii) build a user interface, and (iii) implement camera calibration. Besides these internships, I was involved in developing a framework for a Java-to-COM bridge product for TechSpan Inc. (merged with Headstrong in 2003) from September-December 2001.
Software Skills I have implemented most of the above referenced projects using C or C++. I also extensively used OpenGL in a graphics course at IIT and during my research project regarding the 3D Morphable model. I have also used libraries for invoking standard computer vision routines and solving linear algebraic functions.
Personal Interests I am an avid squash player, enjoy all racquet sports, and admit an infatuation with Cricket. I was the captain of the squash team at I.I.T. Delhi (2001-02) and a member of the squash varsity team at McGill University (2008-09). I also love photography and traveling. I have been fortunate enough to visit several countries in Europe, various cities in USA and Central America, and have traveled extensively in Canada (primarily in Quebec). Oh and let's not forget India, where I was born and raised!
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