CS Colloquium
April 2, 2009
4:00 p.m., AKW 200

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Host: Julie Dorsey

Speaker: Ayellet Tal, Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering
Title: 3D Shape Analysis for Archaeology

Abstract: Shape analysis has gained an increasing interest in computer graphics in the last 10 years, with myriad applications in graphics, as well as in other fields. One such field is archaeology, where the analysis of the shape of artifacts is often our only window to ancient civilizations. Since archaeology is rapidly approaching an impasse in its ability to handle the overwhelming amount of data, the challenge is to replace some of the manual analysis with automatic 3D analysis.

After briefly discussing the field of 3D shape analysis, we will describe an outstanding city - the city of Dor - a vibrant multi-cultural port city, inhabited from the Bronze age until the Roman period. We will then present our solution to a particular problem - illustration of artifacts. We define a new class of view-independent curves, denoted demarcating curves, which are the loci of the “strongest” inflections on the surface. We will demonstrate their appealing capabilities to extract and emphasize 3D textures, which make them a worthy alternative to the expensive, time-consuming, and biased manual depiction currently used.

Bio: Ayellet Tal is is an associate professor at the Technion's Department of Electrical Engineering. She received a B.Sc. in Mathematics and Computer Science from Tel-Aviv University and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Princeton University. Her research interests include computer graphics and information and scientific visualization.