Lawrence B. Wolff's home page

Lawrence B. Wolff

Professor of Computer Science

Joint Appointment Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Education

Ph.D.   Computer Science                Columbia University     1991 
M.Phil. Computer Science                Columbia University     1989 
M.S.    Computer Science                Columbia University     1988 
B.S.    Mathematics and Physics         Yale University         1981

Research Interests

Computer Vision, Physics-Based Vision, Hyperspectral Imaging, Color Science, Computational Sensors for Vision and Robotics, Computer Graphics, Differential Geometry

Much of Computer Vision is concerned with the physical interpretation of a world scene from an image, or set of images. In the past decade the rapidly growing area of Physics-Based Vision has become of vastly increasing importance to the development of rigorous high performance Computer Vision algorithms for use in automated vision systems. Professor Wolff is studying a number of aspects of hyperspectral imaging which involves the understanding of imagery beyond the visible spectrum including infrared imaging and polarization vision. Polarization affords a more general description of light than does intensity, and can therefore provide a richer set of descriptive physical constraints for the interpretation of an imaged scene. Prof. Wolff is developing new polarization vision algorithms, and new types of sensors called polarization cameras that automatically sense and computational process polarization information. Prof. Wolff is also developing more accurate reflectance models for use in Computer Vision and Computer Graphics, as well as new photometrically based  stereo vision algorithms for recovery of 3-D shape. Prof. Wolff has applied some of this work to Medical imaging.

Education Interests

Prof. Wolff has played an instrumental role in the development of the curriculum for the new Computer Engineering program in the GWC Whiting School of Engineering at Johns Hopkins where he serves on the faculty committee for this program. His course Computer Vision 600.461 is an elective in the CE program. Prof. Wolff is also Principal Investigator (with 6 co-PIs in Computer Science and 1 co-PI in Computer Science at Brown University) on a $1.7 M  5-year National Science Foundation Equipment Research Infrastructure grant in the Department of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins. This grant has provided key infrastructure to both research and education within the department of computer science.

COMPUTER VISION 600.461 FALL 1999

COMPUTER VISION 600.461 FALL 1998

COMPUTER ENGINEERING

NSF CISE GRANT

RESUME
 

SELECTED RECENT PUBLICATIONS (for full publication list see RESUME)

Books

Physics-Based Vision: Principles and Practice, Volume 1: Radiometry. Editors L.B. Wolff, S. Shafer, G. Healey. Jones and Bartlett Publishers Inc., 1992.

Physics-Based Vision: Principles and Practice, Volume 2: Color. Editors G. Healey, S. Shafer, L.B. Wolff. Jones and Bartlett Publishers Inc., 1992.

Physics-Based Vision: Principles and Practice, Volume 3: Shape Recovery. Editors L.B. Wolff, S. Shafer, G. Healey. Jones and Bartlett Publishers Inc., 1992.
 

Book Chapters

Wolff, L.B.,  Photometric Light Sources, Appears in the Encyclopedia of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, published by John Wiley & Sons., 1999

Wolff, L.B.,  Enhanced Capabilities For Battlefield Awareness Using Polarization Sensors, Appearing in the book on  Reconnaisance, Surveillance, and Target Acquisition For the Unmanned Ground Vehicle: Providing Surveillance 'Eyes' for an Autonomous Vehicle, edited by Oscar Firschein, Tom Strat, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 1997. pp. 429-438.

N. Shashar, T.W. Cronin, G. Johnson, L.B. Wolff,  Designs for Submersible Imaging Polarimeters, Appearing in Ultraviolet Radiation and Coral Reefs, 1995.
 

Magazine Articles

Cronin, T., Shashar, N., and Wolff, L.B., Underwater Portable Imaging Polarimeters, Biophotonics, April, 1995. Showcased on Magazine cover for
this issue.

Wolff, L.B., Applications of Polarization Camera Technology, IEEE EXPERT, October, 1995.
 

Journal Articles

Angelopoulou, E, and Wolff, L.B., Sign of Gaussian Curvature from Curve Orientation in Photometric Space,  IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI) October 1998.

Wolff, L.B., Nayar, S.K., and Oren, M.,  Improved Diffuse Reflection Models For Computer Vision, International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV), October 1998

Chen, H. and Wolff, L.B.,  A Polarization Phase-Based Method For Material Classification In Computer Vision, International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV), June, 1998.

Kalayjian, Z, Andreou A., Wolff L.B., 1D Polarization Contrast Retina. Electronics Letters. September 1997, vol. 33, pp.38-40.

Wolff, L.B., Mancini, T., Pouliquen, P., and Andreou, A., Liquid Crystal Polarization Camera, IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, April 1997.

Williams, J.P. and Wolff, L.B., Analysis of the Pulmonary Vascular Tree Using Differential Geometry Based Vector Fields, Journal of Computer Vision and Image Understanding (CVIU) February 1997.

Fan, J.. and Wolff, L.B., Surface Curvature and Shape Reconstruction From Unknown Multiple Illumination and Integrability, Journal of Computer Vision and Image Understanding (CVIU) February 1997.

Wolff, L.B., and Boult, T.E.. Constraining Object Features Using a Polarization Reflectance Model. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI), Special Issue on Physical Models For Computer Vision, July, 1991, pp. 635-657.

Wolff, L.B.. Polarization-Based Material Classification from Specular Reflection. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI), Vol. 12, No. 11, November 1990, pp. 1059-1071.

Wolff, L.B., and Kurlander, D.J.. Ray Tracing With Polarization Parameters. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, November 1990, pp. 44-550.
 

Conference Articles

Socolinsky, D.A., and Wolff, L.B, A New Paradigm for Visualization of Multispectral Imagery. IEEE conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), June 1999, Ft. Collins, Co.

Wolff, L.B., Lundberg, A., and Tang, R., Image Understanding From Polarization of Thermal Emission, IEEE conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), June 1998, Santa Barbara.

Angelopoulou, A., Williams, J. and Wolff, L.,  A Curvature based descriptor  invariant to pose and albedo derived from Photometric data, Proceedings of the IEEE conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), June 1997, Puerto Rico, pp. 165-171

Wolff, L.B., and Socolinsky, D.A., Theory and Analysis of Color Discrimination for the Computation of Color edges Using Camera Sensors in Machine Vision, Proceedings of AIC Color 97: The 8th International Congress of the International Colour Association, Kyoto, Japan, May 1997.

Socolinsky, D.A., and Wolff, L.B., Accurate Visualization of the CIE Color Surface in 3-Space, Proceedings of AIC Color 97: The 8th International Congress of the International Colour Association, Kyoto, Japan, May 1997.