In this talk, I will discuss three related tasks that enable us to recognize humans, their actions and build 3D models of the scenes they are in using unconstrained images and videos collected at range and varying altitudes. For human recognition and identification at range and altitude, we build rich semantic representations for faces, bodies, and gait. For action recognition using ground and airborne video cameras, we use synthetic to real domain adaptation concepts. Our approach for 3D modeling of scenes from disparate images collected at varying altitudes is based on neural radiance fields and Gaussian splatting methods. Results on challenging datasets will also be presented.
Prof. Rama Chellappa is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor in Computer Vision and Artificial Intelligence in the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) in the Whiting School of Engineering and Biomedical Engineering in the School of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University (JHU). At Hopkins, he is serving as an interim co-Director of the Data Science and Artificial Intelligence Institute, and is affiliated with CIS, CLSP, IAA and MINDS. He also holds a non-tenured position as a College Park Professor in the ECE department at the University of Maryland. His research interests are in artificial intelligence, computer vision, machine learning and pattern recognition. He received the 2012 K. S. Fu Prize from the International Association of Pattern Recognition (IAPR). He is a recipient of the Society, Technical Achievement, and Meritorious Service Awards from the IEEE Signal Processing Society, the Technical Achievement and Meritorious Service Awards from the IEEE Computer Society and the Inaugural Leadership Award from the IEEE Biometrics Council. He received the 2020 IEEE Jack S. Kilby Medal for Signal Processing, the 2023 IEEE Computer Society Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence Distinguished Researcher Award, and the 2024 Edwin H. Land Medal from Optica (formerly Optical Society of America). He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Foreign Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering. He has been recognized as a Distinguished Alumni by the ECE department at Purdue University and the Indian Institute of Science. He is a Fellow of AAAI, AAAS, ACM, AIMBE, IAPR, IEEE, NAI, OSA, and the Washington Academy of Sciences and holds nine patents.