Seminar Visual Computing

MAS; 2 SWS; ECTS: 5; Prof. Dr.-Ing. Tobias Günther, Prof. Dr. Tim Weyrich

Reiter

Description

This seminar covers advanced topics in visual computing, including both seminal research papers, as well as the latest research results. The seminar provides an opportunity to obtain a comprehensive overview of research questions in visual computing, as well as allows students to dive deeper into a chosen topic. Each student presents one scientific publication and explains its content to fellow students taking the course. Thereby, students practice their argumentation and presentation skills. For each paper, a supervisor is provided, who answers questions and gives pointers on the presentation slide design. The seminar is concluded with a short written report.

Topics

The main topics include:

human performance capture (faces, eyes, speech),
animation (motion controllers, speech synthesis, shape modelling)
fabrication (caustic design, robot design),
appearance modelling (subsurface scattering),
Monte Carlo rendering (importance sampling, participating media),
differentiable rendering (neural rendering, inverse rendering),
denoising (non-local means and deep learning),
physics simulation (fluid simulation)

The seminar contains the paper presentations by the students and introductory lectures on scientific dissemination. This course is taught in German and English.

Grading

Each student presents a paper, which is a selected from a set of papers in the first session. The presentation duration is 30 minutes with an additional 10 minutes for questions. Presentations begin approximately 3-4 weeks after the start of the semester. The presentation contributes to 70% of the final grade. A written report with a duration of 5-10 pages constitutes the remaining 30%, for which a LaTeX template is provided. The presentation time slots are grouped by topic and cannot be chosen. An important aspect of the grading is the subsequent discussion. To spur discussions, students are encouraged to write a brief abstract about each paper, which can be uploaded on StudOn before the presentation. The voluntary abstracts are graded and if more than 80% of the available points are reached the final grade is improved by 0.3 or 0.4 grade points, respectively.

Goals and Competences

Students are able to:

present current research topics in visual computing
perform a literature research
learn to cite correctly
comprehend scientific texts
improve their presentation and argumentation skills
practice scientific writing

Registration & Paper Selection

In this seminar, each student gives a presentation on a selected topic. The available topics are presented in the first session.
By the end of the following week, all students who are interested in taking the seminar must send a prioritized list of three topics that they would be willing to take via email to ✉ tobias.guenther@fau.de.
Afterwards, the topics will be assigned in the order in which students have registered on StudOn!
This means that the first 22 students are guaranteed to have a spot only if they send the prioritized topic list. Otherwise, their registration is invalidated and the next student fills their spot.

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