[Gfx-cafe] GFX Cafe Seminar Friday March 7, 2008

GFX Café Seminar Friday March 7, 2008
12noon, ARTS Lab Black Box Theatre ** Note change of venue **

Food will be served

TITLE:
Adapting compositing software from motion picture production
to analysis of live macrophage cells
by Carl Diegert, Sandia National Laboratories

ABSTRACT:
Technology for producing motion pictures by combining visual elements
from separate sources has enabled new creativity in storytelling. Amazing
advances in this technology have arguably directly contributed to
profitability of films that innovate in use of advances in this
technology. A byproduct of this market pull is a robust and capable
breed of commercial software products for node-based, digital compositing.

A difficult analysis of fluorescent microscopy images of dynamic response
of live macrophage cells to a pathogen was on my plate last month, and
will be the basis for the case study I will present in this talk. The
approach I will review was to adapt Fusion, a node-based, compositing
product from Eyeon Software, Inc., to the qualitative and quantitative
analysis of these cells. While video products are helpful in presenting
and discussing our scientific results, I will report that the power of
interaction with the scientific imaging in Fusion has motivated us to
build a rich Internet application (RIA) to make some of this interaction
available to everyone with a web browser and an interest in our cell
observations.

For the hands-on case study, we will:

1. Watch live macrophage cell behavior results presented as video products
that integrate motion-graphics and motion-imaging. Show interaction
using multiple instances of typical personal-computer, video-viewer
software.

2. Discuss and demonstrate motion tracking, optical flow estimation, and
rotoscoping using commercial products Fusion and PF Track. After an
example with a conventional, perspective-camera capture, apply the
techniques to the imaging from Sandia's compound microscope, a
telecentric system.

3. Show my code that adapts the Fusion product to doing the quantitative
cell analysis task.

4. Return to a more critical analysis of (1), and point out that viewing
with typical video playback software is less than helpful in guiding
the analysis.

5. Show a powerful A/B Wipe interaction with the live-cell video results
that I have found powerful in doing the analysis.

6. Demonstrate an RIA that makes the helpful A/B Wipe interaction from
Fusion available to collaborators equipped with only mundane personal
computers.

Sandia is a multiprogram laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a
Lockheed Martin Company, for the United States Department of Energy's
National Nuclear Security Administration under contract DE-AC04-94AL85000.

BIO:
Carl Diegert is a scientist at Sandia National Labs.

--
Pradeep Sen
Assistant Professor
Advanced Graphics Lab
Dept. of Electrical & Computer Engineering
University of New Mexico
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