Perception and Cognition for Imaging Applications UPDATED
Instructor: Bernice Rogowitz, Visual Perspectives
Level: Introductory
Duration: 4 hours
Course Date/Time: Monday 16 January 08:30 - 12:45

Benefits:
This course enables the attendee to:

• Understand basic principles of spatial, temporal, and color perception.
• Explore basic cognitive processes, including visual attention and semantics.
• Develop skills in applying knowledge about human perception and cognition to the design and evaluation of imaging, visualization, and graphics systems.

Course Description:
The course introduces human perception and cognition, which can help guide the design and evaluation of imaging systems.  When we interact with a color image, or navigate in a 3D Virtual World, or make judgments about image quality, we are using the same mechanisms that evolved to help us to thrive in the natural world.  The goal of this course is to introduce these fundamental processing mechanisms, and to show how this knowledge can guide engineering decisions.   The course begins with understanding early vision mechanisms, such as contrast and color perception, covers important topics in attention, semantics, and memory, and provides insights into individual differences, aesthetics, and emotion.  These principles are illustrated with real-world imaging and visualization examples, lots of pictures and hands-on demonstrations.

Intended Audience:
This course is designed to provide new insights to imaging scientists, engineers, and application developers.  The goal is to provide a new lens for thinking about the goals of the design, focusing on the image-processing capabilities and limitations of the human observer who is seeing, judging, and interacting with your system. If you are building a new camera or a virtual environment, creating applications for medical imaging or high-energy physics, developing new image quality algorithms or a new method for representing network data, deciding how to treat color in a machine learning algorithm or in a tool for artists, insights from this course will enrich your exploration.

Bernice Rogowitz is the Chief Scientist at Visual Perspectives.  She teaches courses on human perception and cognition to imaging scientists and engineers and collaborates with academic colleagues on research topics inspired by imaging applications.   Her current projects include a novel  analog method for capturing touch behavior, an exploration of recall memory  in 2D, 3D, Virtual and Mixed Reality environments,  visual biases in the  interpretation of COVID-19 data, and the  perception of complex spatial-temporal patterns.  Dr. Rogowitz received her BS in experimental psychology from Brandeis University, a PhD in vision science from Columbia University, and was a post-doctoral Fellow in the Laboratory for Psychophysics at Harvard University.   She was  a scientist and research manager at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center for most of her career, and published more than 80 papers on human color and pattern perception, novel perceptual approaches for visual data analysis and image semantics, and methods for enhancing visual problem solving in medical, financial, and scientific applications.  She is the founder, and past chair of the EI Conference on Human Vision and Electronic Imaging (HVEI), and is co- Editor-in-Chief (with Thrasyvoulos Pappas) of the IS&T Journal of Perceptual Imaging (JPI), which grew from that community. Dr. Rogowitz is a Fellow of IS&T and SPIE, a Senior Member of the IEEE, and the proud recipient of the IS&T’s top honor, Honorary Member.

Discounts given for multiple classes. See Registration Page for details to register.

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