Behind Street View

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/industry/4232286.html
http://labs.live.com/photosynth/
http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/
http://www.cio.com/article/354013/Google_Takes_Street_View_Snaps_in_Paris_Lawsuits_May_Follow

Google Street View Tech Talk

Speaker: Luc Vincent, Google
Date: Thursday, February 14 2008
Time: 12:00PM to 1:00PM
Location: 34-401A (Grier A)
Contact: Victoria Palay, 617.253.8924, palay@csail.mit.edu
Relevant URL:

Unveiled in May 2007, the Street View feature of Google Maps is the result of a substantial engineering effort by a team including mechanical engineers, software engineers, UI designers, computer vision scientists and scores of others. As is true with a number of other projects at Google, the initial vision for Street View was actually provided by Google co-founder Larry Page, who personally collected a street scene video from his moving car in order to bootstrap research in this area. Turning this initial vision into a product required developing major new pieces of technology, including: a robust data collection platform (i.e., a van with lots of camera equipment), a fancy system for computing accurate pose from several imperfect sensors, various software components to stitch, blend, color correct and warp collected imagery, efficient systems to manage a Gargantuan flow of data, JavaScript and Flash software components to integrate Street View to Google Maps, and many others. This presentation will go over some of these components and give the audience a peek at the Street View project from behind the scene.

Luc Vincent joined Google in 2004 as an 'Uber Tech Lead' and is presently responsible for several engineering projects centered around computer vision, including Google's Optical Character Recognition (OCR) efforts and the recently unveiled Street View project, which he
helped bootstrap.

Before Google, Luc was Chief Scientist, and then Vice President of Document Imaging at LizardTech, a developer of advanced image compression software. Prior to this, he led a large research and development team at the prestigious Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). He was also Director of Software Development at Scansoft (now Nuance) and held various technical management and individual contributor positions at Xerox Corporation.

Luc has over 60 publications in the area of vision, image analysis and document understanding. He recently served as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI) and for the Journal of Electronic Imaging. He has also served
as chair for SPIE's conferences on Document Recognition, the International Symposium on Mathematical Morphology (ISMM), and in the program committee of numerous conferences and workshops.

Luc earned his B.S. from Ecole Polytechnique, M.S. in Computer Science from University of Paris XI, and PhD in Mathematical Morphology from the Ecole des Mines de Paris in 1990.

See other events happening in February 2008