Brilliant 10: Deva Ramanan Trains Computers To Identify People
Deva Ramanan Jeff NewtonAnd even to understand what those people are doing. Deva Ramanan clicks a button on his MacBook Air and a video begins to play: Michelle Kwan skating in the 1998 Nagano Olympics. Next to it, a computer program renders what it "sees" in the footage: Kwan's head, legs, torso, upper arms, and forearms, all distinguished by different colors. Ramanan, a computer scientist at University of California at Irvine, trains computers to recognize three-dimensional humans in flat photography. Face-recognition software, which pinpoints the classic eyes-nose-mouth configuration, has been in use for years. But detecting a human body-any human body-is much more Deva RamananAge 33University of California at Irvine challenging for computers due to the endless variety of possible poses, angles, sizes, and outfits. Most researchers will feed a program millions of images to memorize, building a vast database of people. Ramanan, instead, trained his computer program to identify body...