Naejin Kong

Alumni

Perceiving Systems

I am a research scientist at MPI for Intelligent Systems, working with Dr. Michael Black. I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from Dr. Sung Yong Shin at KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology), where I solved a hard technical challenge in the reflection separation problem based on physical properties of polarization. During CVPR 2012, I was invited to the Doctoral Consortium as one of 34 participants from all over the world.

My research focuses on the estimation of intrinsic images from video, which are intermediate representations between image pixels and our physical world. Examples include surface material, illumination, shape and motion. Recent outcomes published in top venues (see Intrinsic Video; Intrinsic Depth) contribute to take a step forward for a more integrated treatment of intrinsic images.

Please find my Curriculum Vitae.

Please find my Curriculum Vitae.

[download as pdf]

6 results (View BibTeX file of all listed publications)

2015

Intrinsic Depth: Improving Depth Transfer with Intrinsic Images

Kong, N., Black, M. J.

In IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), pages: 3514-3522, December 2015 (inproceedings)

Abstract

We formulate the estimation of dense depth maps from video sequences as a problem of intrinsic image estimation. Our approach synergistically integrates the estimation of multiple intrinsic images including depth, albedo, shading, optical flow, and surface contours. We build upon an example-based framework for depth estimation that uses label transfer from a database of RGB and depth pairs. We combine this with a method that extracts consistent albedo and shading from video. In contrast to raw RGB values, albedo and shading provide a richer, more physical, foundation for depth transfer. Additionally we train a new contour detector to predict surface boundaries from albedo, shading, and pixel values and use this to improve the estimation of depth boundaries. We also integrate sparse structure from motion with our method to improve the metric accuracy of the estimated depth maps. We evaluate our Intrinsic Depth method quantitatively by estimating depth from videos in the NYU RGB-D and SUN3D datasets. We find that combining the estimation of multiple intrinsic images improves depth estimation relative to the baseline method.

pdf suppmat YouTube official video poster Project Page [BibTex]

2015

Kong, N., Black, M. J. Intrinsic Depth: Improving Depth Transfer with Intrinsic Images In IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), pages: 3514-3522, December 2015 (inproceedings)

pdf suppmat YouTube official video poster Project Page [BibTex]

2014

Intrinsic Video

Kong, N., Gehler, P. V., Black, M. J.

In Computer Vision – ECCV 2014, 8690, pages: 360-375, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, (Editors: D. Fleet and T. Pajdla and B. Schiele and T. Tuytelaars ), Springer International Publishing, September 2014 (inproceedings)

Abstract

Intrinsic images such as albedo and shading are valuable for later stages of visual processing. Previous methods for extracting albedo and shading use either single images or images together with depth data. Instead, we define intrinsic video estimation as the problem of extracting temporally coherent albedo and shading from video alone. Our approach exploits the assumption that albedo is constant over time while shading changes slowly. Optical flow aids in the accurate estimation of intrinsic video by providing temporal continuity as well as putative surface boundaries. Additionally, we find that the estimated albedo sequence can be used to improve optical flow accuracy in sequences with changing illumination. The approach makes only weak assumptions about the scene and we show that it substantially outperforms existing single-frame intrinsic image methods. We evaluate this quantitatively on synthetic sequences as well on challenging natural sequences with complex geometry, motion, and illumination.

pdf Supplementary Video DOI Project Page [BibTex]

2014

Kong, N., Gehler, P. V., Black, M. J. Intrinsic Video In Computer Vision – ECCV 2014, 8690, pages: 360-375, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, (Editors: D. Fleet and T. Pajdla and B. Schiele and T. Tuytelaars ), Springer International Publishing, September 2014 (inproceedings)

pdf Supplementary Video DOI Project Page [BibTex]

A physically-based approach to reflection separation: from physical modeling to constrained optimization

Kong, N., Tai, Y., Shin, J. S.

IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI), 36(2):209-221, IEEE Computer Society, Febuary 2014 (article)

Abstract

We propose a physically-based approach to separate reflection using multiple polarized images with a background scene captured behind glass. The input consists of three polarized images, each captured from the same view point but with a different polarizer angle separated by 45 degrees. The output is the high-quality separation of the reflection and background layers from each of the input images. A main technical challenge for this problem is that the mixing coefficient for the reflection and background layers depends on the angle of incidence and the orientation of the plane of incidence, which are spatially varying over the pixels of an image. Exploiting physical properties of polarization for a double-surfaced glass medium, we propose a multiscale scheme which automatically finds the optimal separation of the reflection and background layers. Through experiments, we demonstrate that our approach can generate superior results to those of previous methods.

Publisher site [BibTex]

Kong, N., Tai, Y., Shin, J. S. A physically-based approach to reflection separation: from physical modeling to constrained optimization IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI), 36(2):209-221, IEEE Computer Society, Febuary 2014 (article)

Publisher site [BibTex]

2012

A physically-based approach to reflection separation

Kong, N., Tai, Y., Shin, S. Y.

In Proc. IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pages: 9-16, June 2012 (inproceedings)

Abstract

We propose a physically-based approach to separate reflection using multiple polarized images with a background scene captured behind glass. The input consists of three polarized images, each captured from the same view point but with a different polarizer angle separated by 45 degrees. The output is the high-quality separation of the reflection and background layers from each of the input images. A main technical challenge for this problem is that the mixing coefficient for the reflection and background layers depends on the angle of incidence and the orientation of the plane of incidence, which are spatially-varying over the pixels of an image. Exploiting physical properties of polarization for a double-surfaced glass medium, we propose an algorithm which automatically finds the optimal separation of the reflection and background layers. Thorough experiments, we demonstrate that our approach can generate superior results to those of previous methods.

Publisher site [BibTex]

2012

Kong, N., Tai, Y., Shin, S. Y. A physically-based approach to reflection separation In Proc. IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pages: 9-16, June 2012 (inproceedings)

Publisher site [BibTex]

2011

High-quality reflection separation using polarized images

Kong, N., Tai, Y., Shin, S. Y.

IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 20(12):3393-3405, IEEE Signal Processing Society, December 2011 (article)

Abstract

In this paper, we deal with a problem of separating the effect of reflection from images captured behind glass. The input consists of multiple polarized images captured from the same view point but with different polarizer angles. The output is the high quality separation of the reflection layer and the background layer from the images. We formulate this problem as a constrained optimization problem and propose a framework that allows us to fully exploit the mutually exclusive image information in our input data. We test our approach on various images and demonstrate that our approach can generate good reflection separation results.

Publisher site [BibTex]

2011

Kong, N., Tai, Y., Shin, S. Y. High-quality reflection separation using polarized images IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 20(12):3393-3405, IEEE Signal Processing Society, December 2011 (article)

Publisher site [BibTex]

2010

Coded exposure imaging for projective motion deblurring

Tai, Y., Kong, N., Lin, S., Shin, S. Y.

In Proc. IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pages: 2408-2415, June 2010 (inproceedings)

Abstract

We propose a method for deblurring of spatially variant object motion. A principal challenge of this problem is how to estimate the point spread function (PSF) of the spatially variant blur. Based on the projective motion blur model of, we present a blur estimation technique that jointly utilizes a coded exposure camera and simple user interactions to recover the PSF. With this spatially variant PSF, objects that exhibit projective motion can be effectively de-blurred. We validate this method with several challenging image examples.

Publisher site [BibTex]

2010

Tai, Y., Kong, N., Lin, S., Shin, S. Y. Coded exposure imaging for projective motion deblurring In Proc. IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pages: 2408-2415, June 2010 (inproceedings)

Publisher site [BibTex]

Naejin Kong

2015

Intrinsic Depth: Improving Depth Transfer with Intrinsic Images

2015

2014

Intrinsic Video

2014

A physically-based approach to reflection separation: from physical modeling to constrained optimization

2012

A physically-based approach to reflection separation

2012

2011

High-quality reflection separation using polarized images

2011

2010

Coded exposure imaging for projective motion deblurring

2010

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