Forum

I am constantly looking at technologies and their application. I also look at teaching philosophies and courses. I came across the following overview of a computational photography course and thought that this would make a great foundation for an undergraduate "state  of the art" of photography course — less any calculus that the original course involves.

Overview

The ubiquity of digital cameras and the internet, coupled with advances in computer vision and graphics, are bringing about a qualitative change in the way photographs can be captured, manipulated, and organized. Indeed, even our traditional concepts of a "camera" and a "photo" are now being challenged by newer, more flexible alternatives in which computation plays a much more central role.

In this seminar course will we will review recent work that tightly integrates computation, sensing, optics, and/or the internet in order to enhance the photography experience. The course will cover four general topics:

• Internet photography: processing and interacting with web-based photo collections (e.g., 3D reconstruction, photo-tourism, recognition)
• Photo reconstruction and restoration: inpainting, matting, blending, motion deblurring, denoising, etc
• Mathematical models of light and light transport
• Advanced photography systems & techniques: high-dynamic range photography, panoramic imaging, computational illumination, computational optics, novel camera designs