John K. Johnstone
Associate Professor
Graduate Program Director (please look over the graduate web pages before contacting me)
Co-Director, GRAIL
Co-Director, CS Summer Camp for High School Students
Department of Computer and Information Sciences
University of Alabama at Birmingham
Birmingham, AL 35294-1170
secretary: (205) 934-2213;
office: (205) 975-5633;
fax: (205) 934-5473.
email: jj at cis.uab.edu
office: 125 Campbell Hall
GRAIL lab: 142 Campbell Hall, 934-8618
CS250: Discrete Structures,
CS350: Automata and Formal Language Theory,
CS680/780: Numerical Computing Foundations,
Structure from motion
biographical sketch,
conferences,
links
meshes
My research is in shape modeling, the modeling and analysis of the shape of objects.
These shapes might be digital characters in a Pixar movie (see Wall-E),
buildings from the imagination of an architect (see Frank Gehry),
the latest automobile or aircraft design (see the Boeing 777, which was designed
digitally without physical prototypes),
anatomical models reconstructed from CT or MR images (see hip implants custom
designed for your femur),
or a precise representation of the scene in which a robot must plan motion
(see the Mercedes Benz factory floor).
Areas of current research interest include:
- reconstruction of meshes and smooth surfaces from point data
- reconstruction of meshes and smooth surfaces from curve data
- mesh semantics (with David O'Gwynn and Douglas Ross)
- semantic mining of online image databases,
including canonical views and multiple view geometry (with Lin Yang)
- software suites for shape modeling
- anatomical modeling for biomedicine
- registration of multiple shape models
- tangent space analysis of smooth shapes, emphasizing dual representations
and the calculation of bitangency, leading to visibility analysis of smooth scenes
- hulls and kernels of smooth shapes
- mesh data structures
- Bezier and Hermite curves and surfaces