Dr. Nick Gans, Principal Research Scientist and head of the Automation and Intelligence Division, attended the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), where he organized The First Workshop on Photorealistic Image and Environment Synthesis for Computer Vision (PIES-CV). This workshop engaged experts and researchers on the synthesis of photorealistic images and virtual environments, particularly in the form of public datasets, software tools, and infrastructures, for computer vision (CV) research. Such public datasets, software tools, and infrastructures can enable researchers to better design, test and compare CV algorithms and will lower entry barriers by enabling researchers that lack expensive hardware. Photorealistic image and environment synthesis can benefit multiple research areas in addition to CV, such as machine learning, robotics, human perception, multimedia systems, and mixed reality.
WACV is a premier international computer vision event comprising the main conference and several co-located workshops and tutorials. The conference was held January 3-7 in Waikoloa, Hawaii.