Research Topics for Prospective Graduate Students

Computer Graphics

• Crowd Simulation: We are investigating crowd simulation for indoor and outdoor environments. We work on including incorporating personality traits and sociologic factors into the crowd behavior, modeling panic behavior for emergency situations.

• View-dependent Visualization of Complex Graphical Environments: We will investigate occlusion culling, view-dependent visualization of urban environments. We will also investigate stereoscopic visualization techniques.

• Finite Element Techniques for Surgical Simulations: We work on a framework for surgical simulations using Finite Element Method. We are investigating efficient techniques to solve systems of equations using the computational power of current GPUs. We plan to develop algorithms for providing interactive and reactive virtual environment without sacrificing the correctness of the simulation such as deformation and cut of soft tissues.

• Articulated Figure Animation: We will continue our research on articulated figure animation. Currently, we have a system for articulated figure animation using analytical techniques to control the motion of articulated figures. The system also realistically renders articulated figures with muscles and skin.

• Facial Animation: We work on various research problems about facial animation. This will be in the direction of generating facial expressions of individuals, by using the face models generated for individuals from a generic face model. This is done by deforming the generic face model using the photographs of individuals. Besides,the muscle vectors also should be arranged for an individual, to generate facial expressions.

Multimedia Databases (Joint Research with Dr. O. Ulusoy)

• Here, we are developing a multimedia database system for querying in video databases. We need a couple of students to work in different parts of this project, like query query processing, semantic queries, color, texture, shape and motion queries, data modeling, etc. See Multimedia Database Research Group Web Page for detailed information on our research on Multimedia Databases.