We are delighted to announce that Professor Niloy Mitra has been selected to receive a Google Research Award for his research on the topic of "UrbanPlan: Creating Massive-scale Structured Urban Models." Professor Mitra’s work will be supported by an unrestricted research grant for one year.
“I am very proud to have received such a competitive award,” said Professor Mitra. “The research fund will be used to partially support our ongoing research on semantic urban reconstruction.”
The Google Research Awards are part of the company’s commitment to developing new technologies to help users find and use information. In order to do so, Google maintains strong ties with academic institutions worldwide, and allocates the annual Google Research Awards to recognise and support world-class, cutting-edge research.
The award is highly competitive - only 15% of applicants receive funding - and each proposal goes through a rigorous Google-wide review process.
Niloy Mitra is Professor of Geometry Processing in the Department of Computer Science. His research interests include shape analysis, computational design and fabrication, and broadly geometry processing.
“My proposal to the Google Research Awards was inspired by a recent paper on “Large-scale Structured Urban Reconstruction”, he explained. “The creation of high-quality semantically parsed 3D models for dense metropolitan areas is a significant urban modeling problem."
“Although acquisition techniques and processing algorithms have advanced in recent years, these data-sources are typically noisy, and incomplete. In this paper, we presented an automatic data fusion technique that produces high-quality structured models of city blocks. From coarse polygonal meshes, street-level imagery, and GIS footprints, we formulate a binary integer program that globally balances sources of error to produce semantically parsed mass models with associated façade elements. We demonstrate our system on many different city regions of varying complexity.”
Please join us in congratulating Professor Mitra on this great achievement!
Find out more about Professor Mitra’s research on “Large-scale Structured Urban Reconstruction” here.
Find out more about Research at Google here.
