Some of My Favorite Computer Vision Researchers
Part of becoming familiar with a new field is figuring out who the major figures are, and their relationships. This page is intended to save you some time in getting oriented; after that, I expect you'll form your own opinions and most likely disagree with mine. Thass cool.
Apologies to everyone left out — what can I say, I'm a lazy bum.
Robert Tarjan: It isn't really fair to compare mere mortal computer vision researchers with Robert Tarjan; he's one of the all-time computer science theory greats, who walks with the gods, revolutionizes entire fields before breakfast, and occasionally drops by to do the same for computer vision, probably while actually eating breakfast.
Tarjan is The Hacker's Friend because whereas other great theoreticians tend to spend their time proving that given problems are undecidable or such, which is interesting but doesn't help one ship code by dawn, Tarjan particularly delights in finding algorithms for practically important problems which run in linear time, or near-linear time. Consequently, it is hard to write a significant application without using a Tarjan algorithm — and I cannot imagine why anyone would try. When a new Tarjan paper comes out, you should cancel your appointments, lock the door, unplug the phone, and settle down for another real treat.
For additional general background on Tarjan see his Wikipedia entry.
Tarjan papers of specific relevance to computer vision include:
Tarjan's mortal manifestation has a home page here.
There are probably dozens of pages like this honoring him.
Vladimir Kolmogorov and Yuri Boykov are the enfants terrible of the breakthrough 1998-2008 period in computer vision, together being author or co-author on perhaps two-thirds of the the core ground-breaking papers of the period. Any paper with either of their names on it deserves careful reading; when they write a paper together you should unplug the phone, make tea, and settle down in an easy chair.
Kolmogorov got his degree in computer vision in 2003 -- see his dissertation.
Computer vision isn't even Boykov's primary field -- Olga Veksler mentions in her dissertation that she dragged him into the field.
NB:Try not confuse Vladimir Kolmogorov with Andrey Kolmogorov, born in 1903 and famed for such foundational work as Kolmogorov Complexity.
Papers they are co-authors on include:
Other papers Boykov is author or co-author on include:
Boykov has a home page here.
Other papers Kolmogorov is author or co-author on include:
Kolmogorov has a home page here.
Pushmeet Kohli is a recent arrival who already has his name on a great string of papers including his 2007 dissertation:
Kohli has a homepage here.
Andrew Delong hasn't even completed his dissertation, yet has already cranked out great stuff, co-authored with the likes of Boykov and Kolmogorov no less! He seems to have an indecent amount of fun in the process -- I'm jealous. I'm also a bit impatient to read his dissertation and his computer vision library. :-)
Papers already graced by his name include:
Delong has a home page here.
Back to Cynbe's Computer Vision Papers by Topic.