William T. Freeman is the Thomas and Gerd Perkins Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at MIT, and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) there. He was the Associate Department Head of EECS from 2011 - 2014. Since 2015, he has also been a research manager in Google Research in Cambridge, MA.
His current research interests include mid-level vision and computational photography. Previous research topics include steerable filters and pyramids, orientation histograms, the generic viewpoint assumption, color constancy, computer vision for computer games, motion magnification, and belief propagation in networks with loops. He received outstanding paper awards at computer vision or machine learning conferences in 1997, 2006, 2009, 2012 and 2019, and test-of-time awards for papers from 1990, 1995 and 2005. He shared the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Physics for a consulting role with the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration, which reconstructed the first image of a black hole. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a Fellow of the IEEE, ACM, and AAAI. In 2019, he received the PAMI Distinguished Researcher Award, the highest award in computer vision.
We aim to understand 3D object structure from a single image. We propose an end-to-end framework which sequentially estimates 2D keypoint heatmaps and 3D object structure, by training it on both real 2D-annotated images and synthetic 3D data and by integrating a 3D-to-2D projection layer.
We study the problem of 3D object generation. We propose a novel framework, 3D Generative Adversarial Network (3D-GAN), leveraging recent advances in volumetric convolutional networks and generative adversarial nets.
The shared mission of Visual Computing is to connect images and computation, spanning topics such as image and video generation and analysis, photography, human perception, touch, applied geometry, and more.
Our goal is to understand the nature of intelligent behavior in the physical world, through the study of human intelligence and the design and implementation of intelligent robots.
Our researchers create state-of-the-art systems to better recognize objects, people, scenes, behaviors and more, with applications in health-care, gaming, tagging systems and more.
Light lets us see the things that surround us, but what if we could also use it to see things hidden around corners? It sounds like science fiction, but that’s the idea behind a new algorithm out of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) — and its discovery has implications for everything from emergency response to self-driving cars.
