Purdue News

January 31, 1986 A Grant To Develop A Vision System Awarded To Professor Kak WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Avi Kak of the School of Electrical Engineering at Purdue University, has received a grant for almost $1 million from the U.S. Army Night Vision Laboratory for fundamental research in computer vision. The project will involve studies in both robot vision and artificial intelligence, said Kak, professor of electrical engineering. He will direct the $915,000 group effort to develop a vision system that will enable machines to make interpretations of the environment and selectively decide where to focus attention. "The aim of this program is to develop techniques for capturing in a computer the hierarchical aspects of human visual perception," he said. The hierarchical nature of human vision allows people to examine a scene at different scales and zoom back and forth between the scales, he explains. "For example, imagine a vision system mounted on an aircraft looking down on a forest. At one moment, we may want the associated computer to perceive just the overall pattern of vegetation without paying attention to fine-scale details such as individual trees. At the next moment, we may want the computer to make spatial assertions about just those fine-level details," he said. "The focus of this research is to develop a computer vision system with the ability to move back and forth between these two scales," he added, noting that today's computer vision systems give equal weight to every point in an image and are incapable of developing such conceptual hierarchies. Kak joined the Purdue faculty in 1970 as a professor of electrical engineering. His research interests include computer reasoning systems, robot vision and vision-controlled manipulation. He has co-authored three books on digital picture processing and computerized imaging. Purdue News Service: (765) 494-2096; purduenews@purdue.edu