NEWS

At Nagoya University’s Graduate School of Informatics, the Department of Intelligent Systems is holding a course as part of their curriculum where they invite guest speakers to hold lectures. The lectures are focused on specific areas in the general field of intelligent systems, such as measurement, recognition, or positioning in areas like autonomous driving or similar topics. As a part of this series, Mitsuru Nakazawa, one of Rakuten Institute of Technology’s researchers in the field of real world sensing and computer vision got the honor of holding a lecture for the students.

The title of the lecture was Principles of Depth Sensing and Its Applications in Rakuten Institute of Technology, and as you might be able to tell from the name, it covers recent developments in the area of depth sensing. From hardware like Microsoft Kinect and Intel RealSense, to methodologies and software libraries, and various applications of these.

2D image analysis has been a large focus for a long time now, and recent developments has created dramatic improvements in what you can do with relatively simple methods and technologies. However, there are a lot of things that 2D images can’t tell us. By comparison, 3D data is much more rich in information, but it is also considerably more difficult to analyze and generate. There are many hardware technologies that try to solve these problems, like including infrared and lasers, or multiple cameras, to combine multiple data sources to estimate things like depth information. However, there are also big developments in the research field with methodologies and software based methods to extract 3D data from things like normal photos.

To bring fields like robotics and human computer interaction to the next level, this is an important area to work on, and that is why Rakuten Institute of Technology is putting resources into it, and why we think the lecture is an important one to give to the students. It is extremely fun to get out and share these topics with the young minds that might be the people who bring the field to the next level, and it seems like the students in the audience were almost as excited about being there as we were. We look forward to seeing their names pop up in research papers in the years to come.

A big thank you to University of Nagoya, the Graduate School of Informatics, and the Department of Intelligent Systems, for giving us the opportunity, and an even bigger thank you to the students who came to the lecture!