Uploaded February 2023 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
David Fouhey
Assistant Professor
University of Michigan
February 24, 2023
https://www.ri.cmu.edu/event/understanding-the-physical-world-from-images/
Understanding the Physical World from Images
If I show you a photo of a place you have never been to, you can easily imagine what you could do in that picture. Your understanding goes from the surfaces you see to the ones you know are there but cannot see, and can even include reasoning about how interaction would change the scene. My research aims to give computers this same level of physical understanding and I believe that this physical understanding will be critical for autonomous agents, as well as for enabling new insights in a surprisingly wide variety of research fields.
This talk will show my work on understanding the physical world from images, done in conjunction with my students both past and present. I will first show how we can reconstruct 3D scenes, including invisible surfaces, from a single RGB image. We have developed an approach that learns to predict a scene-scale implicit function using realistic 3D supervision that can be gathered by consumers or robots instead of by using artist-created watertight 3D assets. After showing reconstructions from our system in everyday scenarios, I will talk about how measuring the world can unlock new insights in science, from millimeter-sized bird bones to solar physics data where a pixel is a few hundred miles wide. I will conclude by showing work towards understanding interaction, especially focusing on hands and the objects they hold.
Bio:
David Fouhey is an assistant professor at the University of Michigan. He received a Ph.D. in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University and was then a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley. His work has been recognized by a NSF CAREER award, and NSF and NDSEG fellowships. He has spent time at the University of Oxford’s Visual Geometry Group, INRIA Paris, and Microsoft Research.
David Fouhey
Assistant Professor
University of Michigan
February 24, 2023
https://www.ri.cmu.edu/event/understanding-the-physical-world-from-images/
Understanding the Physical World from Images
If I show you a photo of a place you have never been to, you can easily imagine what you could do in that picture. Your understanding goes from the surfaces you see to the ones you know are there but cannot see, and can even include reasoning about how interaction would change the scene. My research aims to give computers this same level of physical understanding and I believe that this physical understanding will be critical for autonomous agents, as well as for enabling new insights in a surprisingly wide variety of research fields.
This talk will show my work on understanding the physical world from images, done in conjunction with my students both past and present. I will first show how we can reconstruct 3D scenes, including invisible surfaces, from a single RGB image. We have developed an approach that learns to predict a scene-scale implicit function using realistic 3D supervision that can be gathered by consumers or robots instead of by using artist-created watertight 3D assets. After showing reconstructions from our system in everyday scenarios, I will talk about how measuring the world can unlock new insights in science, from millimeter-sized bird bones to solar physics data where a pixel is a few hundred miles wide. I will conclude by showing work towards understanding interaction, especially focusing on hands and the objects they hold.
Bio:
David Fouhey is an assistant professor at the University of Michigan. He received a Ph.D. in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University and was then a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley. His work has been recognized by a NSF CAREER award, and NSF and NDSEG fellowships. He has spent time at the University of Oxford’s Visual Geometry Group, INRIA Paris, and Microsoft Research.
