Tarek El-Gaaly

Current Projects

• Autonomous indoor robot navigation and obstacle avoidance (using Kinect)


• Collaborative Robotics
A drone (micro-UAV) taking off, tracking and landing on a ground-robot

Previous Projects

• Recognizing human activity in video surveillance
• Part of my MSc Thesis: Measuring atmospheric scattering from sequences of digital images, building a framework for particulate matter measurement and image dehazing




The first figure shows a sequence of images of a hazy scene. The second figure shows the scene resulting from state-of-the-art dehazing and our dehazing algorithm. The last figure shows a comparison with 2 other techniques for dehazing: polarization dehazing and dark channel dehazing. Our dehazing method recovers the hue of the scene and also returns a natural looking sky without any extra processing (see rightmost image of the second figure).

Publications

• Ben Falchuk, Chung-Ying Wu, Tarek El-Gaaly and Akshay Vashist, "Skimming Video Action Using Annotated 3D Surfaces", Eurographics 2011, Wales 2011
• Tarek El-Gaaly and Joshua Gluckman, "Measuring Atmospheric Scattering from Digital Image Sequences", VISAPP 2010

Research Interests

• Computer Vision
• Machine Learning
• Artificial Intelligence
• Swarm Intelligence and Biologically inspired computing

Teaching

• SPRING 2012: CS344 - Design & Analysis of Computer Algorithms
• FALL 2011: CS205 - Discrete Structures
• SPRING 2011: CS334 - Digital imaging and Multimedia
• FALL 2010: CS440 - Intro to Artificial Intelligence
• FALL/SPRING 2009-2010: CS110 - Intro to Computers and Applications