David J. Crandall


Fourth-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science
Cornell University

340 Upson Hall
Ithaca, NY 14853
crandall@cs.cornell.edu
 

Research

I work in computer vision, the area of computer science concerned with automatically interpreting semantic meaning from images, simulating the way a human views a scene.

At Cornell, I have been working with Professor Dan Huttenlocher on part-based object recognition algorithms.

Before coming to Cornell, I spent two years in the research labs of Eastman Kodak Company. There I worked mostly on smart image enhancement and understanding algorithms for consumer and medical images. You can try some of this technology by using Kodak PerfectTouch processing the next time you develop film or print digital photos on-line.

As an undergraduate and Masters student at Penn State University, I worked with Professor Rangachar Kasturi on content-based video indexing. We worked mostly on detecting, tracking and recognizing text in video (both captions and text appearing naturally in a scene).


Selected publications

My complete list of publications is also available.

  • Part-based object recognition
    • "Composite models of objects and scenes for category recognition," in CVPR 2007 (with D. Huttenlocher)
      [pdf]

    • "Weakly-supervised learning of part-based spatial models for visual object recognition," in ECCV 2006 (with D. Huttenlocher)
      [pdf] [download source code]

  • Color-based object recognition
    • "Robust Color Object Detection using Spatial-Color Joint Probability Functions," to appear in IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (with J. Luo)
      [CVPR 2004 version]

  • Content-based video indexing
    • "Extraction of special effects caption text events from digital video," in International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition, 2002 (with S. Antani and R. Kasturi)
      [pdf] [Thesis version] [ICDAR01 version]

  • Image understanding and enhancement
    • "Psychophysical study of image orientation perception," in Spatial Vision, 2003, pp. 429-457. (with J. Luo, A. Singhal, M. Boutell and R. Gray.)


Other projects

These are other projects I've worked on that were never polished enough to be publishable, but that someone somewhere might still find interesting. :-)

Fun interests

During the summer, my main obsession is cycling. I ride for fun only, and I have no delusions that I'm actually any good. My capstone ride for this summer was a 250-mile ride from Ithaca to Lake Erie along scenic Bike Route 17. I like to ski during the winter (aka the majority of the year in upstate New York), although I'm even worse at that.

I'm on a perpetual quest to become fluent in Spanish. In addition to taking classes in high school and throughout college and graduate school, I've studied abroad in Spain and Mexico, and I've also traveled to Puerto Rico and El Salvador. Despite all that effort, my Spanish is still remarkably lousy. :)