I am originally from
St.
Petersburg, Russia, but, due to some mixup at
the travel agency, I now live in
Pittsburgh, USA.
I got my PhD from
UC
Berkeley in 2003 under the supervision of Jitendra Malik. I then
spent a year as
a fine fellow in
lovely Oxford, working
with Andrew Zisserman and
the Visual Geometry
Group.
I came to
CMU in autumn of 2004 with a joint appointment in
the Robotics Institute (my official RI
page)
and CS Department.
I am
a member of the CMU Graphics
Lab and an unofficial groupie of the
VMR Lab. I am also a member of
TETHYS associated team (which includes ENS, INRIA, CMU and
UIUC), and, in particular, have strong collaborations with the
WILLOW Research Team
at ENS where I will be spending much of Spring
2008 term.
Research
My research is in the area of computer vision and computer graphics,
especially at the intersection of the two. I am particularly
interested in using data-driven techniques to tackle problems which
are very hard to model parametrically but where large quantities of
data are readily available. The ultimate goal is to use the
ever-growing amount of stored visual information (digital photo
albums, webcams, movies, etc.) to learn, understand, and resynthesize
the visual world around us.
In very broad strokes, here are the main current themes of my research:
-
Qualitative
3D Reasoning for Image Interpretation: The ability to see and
understand the three-dimensional world behind a two-dimensional image
goes to the very heart of the computer vision problem. The overall
objective of this research effort is, given a single image, to
automatically produce a coherent interpretation of the depicted
scene. On one level, such interpretation should include
opportunistically recognizing known objects (e.g. people, houses,
cars, trees) and known materials (e.g. grass, sand, rock, foliage) as
well as their rough positions and orientations within the scene. But
more than that, the goal is to capture the overall qualitative sense
of the scene.
-
"Brute-forcing" Vision: What could you do with a billion
images? Taking inspiration from Google -- the A.I. for the
post-modern world -- we want to utilize the huge amount of existing
visual data to "look-up" similar images as a cue to interpreting a
previously unseen photograph. That is, we would like to sample from
the entire space of scenes as a way of exhaustively modeling our
visual world. If this works, it might allow us to "brute force" many
currently unsolvable vision and graphics problems!
-
Understanding (and Faking) Visual Realism: Why is it that most
computer-generated imagery doesn't look very realistic? What is it
that the Renaissance artists knew that we don't? Which bits of the
visual experience is it important to "get right", and which could be
safely faked without anyone noticing? The ultimate goal is to make
synthesized images appear as real and convincing as regular
photographs.
Teaching
Former Students
Selected Projects
|
Recognition by Association via Learning Per-exemplar Distances
Tomasz Malisiewicz,
Alexei A. Efros
in CVPR 2008.
|
|
im2gps: estimating geographic information from a single image
James Hays,
Alexei A. Efros
in CVPR 2008.
Flickr download code
available
|
|
Closing the Loop on Scene Interpretation
Derek Hoiem,
Alexei A. Efros,
Martial Hebert
in CVPR 2008.
|
|
Image-based Shaving
Minh Hoai
Nguyen,
Jean-François
Lalonde, Alexei A. Efros,
Fernando de la Torre
in Eurographics 2008.
|
|
Recovering Occlusion Boundaries from a Single Image
Derek Hoiem,
Andrew Stein,
Alexei A. Efros,
Martial Hebert
in ICCV 2007.
Source code available
|
|
Using Color Compatibility for Assessing Image Realism
Jean-François
Lalonde,
Alexei A. Efros
in ICCV 2007.
|
|
Improving Spatial Support for Objects via Multiple Segmentations
Tomasz Malisiewicz,
Alexei A. Efros
in BMVC 2007.
|
|
Scene Completion using Millions of Photographs
James Hays,
Alexei A. Efros
in SIGGRAPH 2007.
Flickr download code
available
See article
on BBC News
|
|
Photo Clip Art
Jean-François
Lalonde,
Derek Hoiem,
Alexei Efros,
Carsten Rother,
John Winn,
Antonio Criminisi
in SIGGRAPH 2007.
See article
on News.fr
|
|
Putting Objects in Perspective
Derek Hoiem,
Alexei A. Efros,
Martial Hebert
In CVPR 2006.
Source code available
Best Paper Award
|
|
Using Multiple Segmentations to Discover Objects and their
Extent in Image Collections
Bryan Russell,
Alexei A. Efros,
Josef Sivic,
Bill Freeman,
Andrew Zisserman
in CVPR 2006
Source code
available
|
|
Discovering Texture Regularity as a Higher-Order Correspondence
Problem
James Hays,
Marius
Leordeanu,
Alexei A. Efros,
Yanxi Liu
in ECCV 2006
Source code available upon
request.
|
|
Geometric Context from a Single Image
Derek Hoiem,
Alexei A. Efros,
Martial Hebert
In ICCV 2005
(see also
expanded journal version, IJCV 2007)
Executable available
(for non-commerical use only)
|
|
Discovering Objects and thier Location in Images
Josef Sivic,
Bryan Russell,
Alexei A. Efros,
Andrew Zisserman,
Bill Freeman
In ICCV 2005
|
|
Automatic Photo Pop-up
Derek Hoiem,
Alexei A. Efros,
Martial Hebert
In SIGGRAPH 2005
See article in The Economist
Technology licensed to FreeWebs as
Fotowoosh
|
|
A Data-Driven Approach to Quantifying Natural Human Motion
Liu Ren,
Alton Patrick,
Alexei A. Efros,
Jessica Hodgins.
James Rehg.
In SIGGRAPH 2005
|
|
Seeing Through
Water
Alexei A. Efros,
Volkan Isler,
Jianbo Shi,
Mirko Visontai
In NIPS 17, 2004
|
|
Recovering Human Body Configurations: Combining Segmentation and
Recognition
Greg Mori,
Xiaofeng Ren,
Alexei A. Efros,
Jitendra Malik
In CVPR 2004
|
|
Recognizing Action at a Distance
Alexei A. Efros,
Alexander Berg,
Greg Mori,
Jitendra Malik
In ICCV 2003
|
|
Image Quilting for Texture Synthesis and Transfer
Alexei A. Efros,
Bill Freeman
In SIGGRAPH 2001
Source code available
|
|
Texture Synthesis by Non-parametric Sampling
Alexei A. Efros,
Thomas
Leung
In ICCV 1999
|
Funding Sources
Misc.
since Jan 2007.
|
