Tasks
Pending
- Joan to write HOD statement
- Lay report
- Personal statment (drafted)
- Technical report
- Send draft to Duncan for passing through the 'lets not make this suck' process
Done
- Rich to send CV to Duncan.
- Rich to fill in FEC part of eGAP form.
Executive summary
Pull together and innovate upon existing expertise, SESAME project, DTI postdoc towards an integrated system for increasing performance of athletes and rehabilitation medicine applications.
Publications
Journals
Computer Graphics using Conformal Geometric Algebra, Joan Lasenby and Anthony Lasenby, To appear in Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc. A special issue. http://www-sigproc.eng.cam.ac.uk/ga/static/c/c7/Rjw_roysoc.pdf
Peer reviewed symposia contributions
Applications of Conformal Geometric Algebra in Computer Vision and Graphics, Rich Wareham, Jonathan Cameron and Joan Lasenby, Lecture Notes in Computer Science - Computer Algebra and Geometric Algebra with Applications. http://www.springerlink.com/content/k60hg6pryarvxwh2/
Personal statement (3500 chars)
My long term career aspiration is to push the envelope of computer graphics research and, crucially, find compelling applications which can help real people. Toward this goal I wish to investigate and extend work in the related fields of motion capture, computer vision and data visualisation. I view computer vision as a discipline tightly coupled to computer graphics in that one is, in a sense, the inverse of the other. In striving to attain a degree of excellence in both fields I aim to develop a fundamental understanding of the nature of human vision and how useful information may both be inferred from, and presented to, a lay-person.
Since October 2005 I have been employed by Geomerics Ltd. performing postdoctoral research as a Senior R&D Engineer. At Geomerics I invented and developed a revolutionary new computer graphics lighting algorithm which allows a radiosity solution, the shading of objects both from direct illumination and light bouncing around the environment, to estimated around a hundred times per second. The research now forms much of the core 'intellectual property' of the company and has generated significant excitement in the lighting community, press interest and investment opportunities.
During my time with the company I have also developed novel research into techniques for sampling using the latent power of modern graphics cards. I created, in addition to the radiosity, a significant innovation on 'Precomputed Radiance Transfer', another popular lighting algorithm. I advanced, to a proof-of-concept stage, some new methods in electromagnetic modelling arising from work performed by academics involved with the company. Examples of the work, including videos, are available from http://www.geomerics.com/index.php?page=lighting and http://www.geomerics.com/index.php?page=emm.
My position within Geomerics has given me an unrivaled grounding in the needs of industry and how they mesh with those of academia. In seeking to return to academia I hope to bring experience gained from Geomerics back with me in order to better focus the application and target audience of my work.
Prior to my position at Geomerics I was working towards my PhD as part of the Signal Processing and Communications Group (http://www-sigproc.eng.cam.ac.uk/ga/) in the Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge. As part of my PhD I investigated how a potentially revolutionary new interpretation of Clifford algebra, termed Geometric Algebra (GA), may help the animation industry with particular relevance to pose interpolation. My most significant advance was finding a natural linear parametisation of rotations and translations allowing any exisitng linear point-based interpolation scheme to be extended naturally to pose and position in arbitrary dimension spaces and multiple geometries. In addition to this I investigated how GA may be extended to handle non-Euclidean geometries and along the way generalised the popular escape time Mandelbrot and Julia fractals to hyperbolic geometries.
Lay proposal (3500 chars)
We propose a project designed to pull together and build upon existing research and expertise to provide a compelling body of research aimed at enhancing the performance of UK athletes and providing useful tools for medical rehabilitation using computer vision, motion capture and computer graphics techniques.
The fundamental mechanism whereby humans learn, improve and progress is feedback. We see the results of our actions, identify errors and attempt to correct them. The rate of improvement and final competance is strongly related to the delay between performance and feedback and the quality of said feedback. We hope that our proposal will lead to improvements in both aspects of althetic and medical feedback through advanced computer graphics and computer vision techniques.
As a concrete example of what we hope to achieve we may consider the training of promising athletes with a view to increasing the performance of the UK within the 2012 Olympics. Our feedback loop consists of three stages: measurement, analysis and presentation.
In the measurement phase the performance of an athelete is measured using a sensor array. For example the SESAME project, which we hope to work with, is tasked with measuring performance using wireless sensors. Another compelling measurement process is motion capture where video images of the athelete are analysed by a computer and their limb positions are calculated. In the analysis phase the captured performance of the athelete is processed to form useful data such as joint positions, rotations and stresses. The final phase, and that which closes the feedback loop, is the presentation of this data to the athelete in an easily digested manner. For example a computer graphic representation of the athelete with a 'false colour' skin showing the underlying joint stresses allow the athelete to rapidly visualise aspects of the performance which waste effort and need to be changed.
We hope to provide novel research contributions in fields related to all three phases. For the measurement phase we can build upon some work done within the institution as part of the SESAME project which will provide a set of sensor data for a particular athelete. For the analysis phase we can make use of some recent advances in a sophisticated modelling technique known as 'Geometric Algebra' which will generate medically useful data about joint poisitions, strains and motion from the raw motion capture data. It is envisineed that the greatest scope for novel research is in the final presentation stage where expertise in real time computer graphics and novel presentation techniques can be used to provide visual feedback for the target audience rapidly after performance capture. For example a deliverable might be the ability for an athelete to see realistic, useful graphical presentations of their performance on a laptop 'trackside'.
Technical proposal (4000 chars)
- Mocap
- Real time calibration
- Markerless mocap
- Analysis
- Skeleton fitting
- Stress analysis
- Visualisation
- Animation
- Skinning
- Model building from video?
Justification of resources
- Salary is based upon institutional pay scales for staff with PhD and 2 years of industrial experience.
- Initial equipment budget includes purchase of laptop computer with
- A high-end graphics card since it is envisioned that the project will be graphics heavy and research experience is in the field of computer graphics.
- A fast data capture rate since it is envisioned that the project will include capturing high-framerate video streams in real time.
- Ongoing equipment budget includes purchase of camera systems for computer vision tasks, sensors for application to body and maintainance/upgrade of the group's motion capture rig.
- Consumables include
- Initial outlay for software to analyse and process data (e.g. MATLAB, Motion Builder, etc).
- Ongoing upgrade of software, stationary, etc.
Bullets
- Work with
- SESAME
- DTI
- Addenbrookes
- EPSRC 'Achieving gold' project
- UK Sports
- Geomerics Ltd
- Build upon
- Existing expertise
- Personal expertise in graphics and animation
- Group expertise in motion capture, computer vision and medical inference
- Generated knowledge
- From DTI post doc into animation techniques
- Research generated during time at Geomerics Ltd
- Original research
- Animaton and skinning
- Join inference from motion capture
- Computer vision and data fusion
- Existing expertise
- To get
- Novel research to build upon in the field of computer graphics and animation
- Techniques and systems to analyse performance and give feedback from multiple sources e.g.
- High speed video
- Wireless motion sensors
- Multiple television framerate video sources
- Passive markers
- Systems and techniques valuble for medical rehabilitation and diagnosis.