New professor from UWB wants to change the way computers understand motion

Libor Váša, a computer scientist from the Faculty of Applied Sciences UWB, was appointed professor on Monday 16 June. He has been working on the question of how to best capture and store motion in 3D. His research aims to make three-dimensional animations as shareable as photos and videos.

Libor Váša, a computer scientist and vice-dean of the Faculty of Computer Science at the UWB, deals with the problem of how to represent shapes that change over time in a computer. A typical example is a person dancing or playing a musical instrument or a flag waving in the wind. "But the computer cannot recognise that, for example, the hand at the beginning of the movement is still the same hand as at the end - and that is the essence of my work," explained Libor Váša.

A suitable representation of a shape can be, for example, a triangular network - and in the case of motion, a sequence of these networks. "The problem is that such data is quite voluminous, so it takes up a lot of space on the computer, and it takes a long time to send it over the network," he added. For this reason, Libor Váša has turned his attention to the compression, or storage, of these dynamic triangular networks. "The goal is to be able to email or share a moving 3D model online as easily as we send static images or short videos today," he said.

His work combines computer graphics, geometric data processing and mathematics. One of the most difficult parts, he says, is finding so-called temporal correspondences - that is, determining which parts of a shape correspond to each other at different points in time. "The interesting thing is that people do this naturally and constantly, for example, when they watch someone move, but the reliable implementation of this process in a computer has not yet been completely successful," Libor Váša pointed out. A successful solution to this problem would bring not only more efficient ways of storing data, but also a deeper understanding of movement itself. This could have implications, for example, for analysing and improving motor skills in people with health problems, for example in rehabilitation.

Libor Váša has previously worked at the Technical University of Chemnitz and has worked on a number of projects funded by GAČR, TAČR and industrial partners. He has authored or co-authored more than 40 scientific publications and his work has been cited more than a thousand times (Google Scholar). He is actively involved in teaching, supervising students and reviewing.