Watch the TechFest 2011 Videos
-
3-D television is creating a huge buzz in the consumer space, but the generation of 3-D content remains a largely professional endeavor. Our research demonstrates an easy-to-use system for creating photorealistic, 3-D-image-based models simply by walking around an object of interest with your phone, still camera, or video camera. The objects might be your custom car or motorcycle, a wedding cake or dress, a rare musical instrument, or a hand-crafted artwork. Our system uses 3-D stereo matching techniques combined with image-based modeling and rendering to create a photorealistic model you can navigate simply by spinning it around on your screen, tablet, or mobile device.
-
Dynamic texture mapping helps bypass the difficulties in rendering soft tissues like lips, tongue, eyes, and wrinkles, moving us one step closer to being able to create a more realistic personal avatar.
-
Steven Bathiche, Director, Microsoft Applied Sciences, shares his team’s latest work on the next generation of Smart Interactive Displays.
-
Face recognition in video is an emerging technology that will have great impact on user experience in fields such as television, gaming, and communication. In the near future, a television or an Xbox will be able to recognize people in the living room, home video will be annotated automatically and become searchable, and TV watchers will be able to get information about an unfamiliar actor, athlete, or singer just by pointing to the person on the screen. Our research showcases the face-recognition technology developed by Innovation Labs. Our technology includes novel algorithms in face detection, recognition, and tracking. The research demonstrates semi-automatic labeling of videos, a novel TV-watching experience using faces in a video as hyperlinks to get more information, and automatic recognition of the person in front of the television, Xbox, or computer.
-
See how a high–performance, 3-D rendering engine can be transformed into a real-world, life-saving medical application.
-
InnerEye focuses on the analysis of patient scans using machine learning techniques for automatic detection and segmentation of healthy anatomy as well as anomalies.
-
See how simulating real-world physics behaviors can be used to manipulate virtual 3-D objects using 3-D projection and a Kinect depth camera.
-
The mobile phone is becoming the most popular consumer camera. While the benefits are quite clear, the mobile scenario presents several challenges. It is not always easy to capture good photos. Image-processing tools can improve photos after capture, but there are few tools tailored to on-phone image manipulation. We present phone-based image enhancement tools that are tightly integrated with cloud services. Heavy computation is off-loaded to the cloud, which enables faster results without impacting the phone’s performance.
-
An object-oriented research project delivers an interactive assistant for freehand drawing by recognizing what you’re trying to draw and suggesting traceable pen strokes to improve your drawing.
-
Nearly every product that Microsoft ships includes technology from Microsoft Research. Through exploration and collaboration with product groups and academic institutions, Microsoft Research advances the state of the art of computing.