About Me ...
I am currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Disney Research Pittsburgh, in conjunction with Carnegie Mellon University. Here I work with Prof. Jessica Hodgins and a number of other excellent researchers. Before coming to Disney Research and CMU, I spent 2 years working as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Computer Science at University of Toronto (UofT). At UofT I worked with Prof. David Fleet and collaborated with a number of his, as well as Prof. Geoff Hinton's students. During my time at UofT I also twice taught an undergraduate Computer Graphics course at University of Toronto, Scarborough.
My doctorate dissertation, Continuous-state Graphical Models for Object Localization, Pose Estimation and Tracking, was written under the supervision of my advisor Prof. Michael J. Black at Brown University. I received my Master's Degree in Computer Science and dual undergraduate degrees in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics from Boston University, where I worked with Prof. Stan Sclaroff.
I also try to maintain an active professional service within the community. As part of that service I regularly review papers for major computer vision and machine learning conferences, and have orginized a number of workshops and, more recently, a tutorial. My full bio and CV can be found here.
My research interests mainly lie in the areas of computer vision, machine learning, and computer graphics. I am particularly interested in statistical models for problems of visual inference. I am probably most known for my work on articulated pose estimation and tracking. More recently I have also conducted research on the articulated shape estimation. My most recent work focuses on the physics-based dynamical simulation priors for articulated human motion modeling and tracking.
Call for papers (closed)
IJCV Special Issue on Evaluation of Articulated Human Motion and Pose Estimation (to be published early in 2010, all 9 manuscripts to appear in the spacial issue are available through the Springer Online First)
Recently accepted papers
Estimating Contact Dynamics, M. Brubaker, L. Sigal and D. Fleet. ICCV, 2009.
Videos: [Supplementary Video - Video Tracking (6mb)],
[Supplementary Video - MoCap (4mb)].
Dynamics and Control of Multibody Systems, M. Vondrak, L. Sigal and O. C. Jenkins. Motion Control, IN-TECH, Vienna, ISBN978-953-7619-X-X, 2009. (accepted, to be published in September 2009)
Shared Kernel Information Embedding for Discriminative Inference, L. Sigal, R. Memisevic, D. Fleet. CVPR, 2009.
Video-Based People Tracking, M. Brubaker, L. Sigal and D. Fleet, Handbook on Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments, H. Nakashima, H. Aghajan, and J.C. Augusto (Eds). To be published by Springer Verlag in 2009.
Selected publications
Physical Simulation for Probabilistic Motion Tracking, M. Vondrak, L. Sigal and O. C. Jenkins. CVPR, 2008.
Combined discriminative and generative articulated pose and non-rigid shape estimation. L. Sigal, A. Balan and M.J. Black. NIPS, 2007.
Predicting 3D People from 2D Pictures. L. Sigal and M. J. Black. AMDO, 2006. (best paper award)
Measure Locally, Reason Globally: Occlusion-sensitive Articulated Pose Estimation. L. Sigal and M. J. Black. CVPR, 2006.
Tracking Loose-limbed People. L. Sigal, S. Bhatia, S. Roth, M. J. Black and M. Isard. CVPR, 2004.
Organized tutorials
Physics-Based Human Motion Modelling for People Tracking (in conjunction with ICCV 2009). Organizers: M. Brubaker, L. Sigal, D. Fleet.
Organized workshops
EHuM2: 2nd Workshop on Evaluation of Articulated Human Motion and Pose Estimation (held in conjunction with CVPR 2007)
EHuM: Workshop on Evaluation of Articulated Human Motion and Pose Estimation (held in conjunction with NIPS 2006)