Ruth Rosenholtz Principal Research Scientist Dept. of Brain and Cognitive Sciences Computer Science and AI Lab (CSAIL) Massachusetts Institute of Technology 46-4115D Cambridge, MA 02139-4307 617-324-0269 rruth_(at)_mit_(dot)_edu

Research interests: Human vision, particularly visual search/attention and texture perception. Also the application of human vision research to user interface design and information visualization, including the study of visual clutter. My meta-level interest is in thinking of the visual system as statistician.

The principle of science, the definition, almost, is the following: The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific “truth.” But what is the source of knowledge? Where do the laws that are to be tested come from? Experiment, itself, helps to produce these laws, in the sense that it gives us hints. But also needed is imagination to create from these hints the great generalizations—to guess at the wonderful, simple, but very strange patterns beneath them all, and then to experiment to check again whether we have made the right guess.

Richard Phillips Feynman

The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1963)

Past and Present Research Focus

Texture and visual search

• Visual search in cluttered environments -- what is clutter?
• Models for visual search and "popout."
• "Asymmetries" in visual search
• Effects of background color on color search
• Models for texture segmentation.
• Segmenting images into textured and non-textured regions.

Related papers and presentations.

Application of human vision research to user interface design and information visualization

• Predicting what groups people will perceive in a design.
• Searching the web with enhanced thumbnails.
• Document browsing aids.
• "Doodle" icons to aid in searching for a computer file.
• Tools for visualizing a large document on a small display.
• Understanding clutter.

Related papers and presentations.

Shape from texture

• Computer vision algorithm for shape from texture and an ideal observer for human vision.
• A texture "aperture effect" and texture transparency.
• Shape from texture for multiple textures.
• Do we use isotropy or homogeneity as a cue for shape from texture?

Related papers and presentations.

Perceptually-based image compression and image quality

• Reducing blocking effects in block transform coded images.
• Perceptually based coding of still images.

Related papers and presentations.

Assorted other work

• Affine structure and photometry.
• Mechanisms of character recognition.

Related papers and presentations.

Biographical Information

• B.S. in Engineering, Swarthmore College, 1988. Senior design project: "Computer recognition of facial features." Advisor: Stephen Platt.
• M.S. in Electrical Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, 1991. Thesis: "Iterative procedures for reduction of blocking effects in transform image coding." Advisor: Avideh Zakhor.
• Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, 1994. Thesis: "Local shape from texture." Advisor: Jitendra Malik.
• Eliahu Jury Award for excellence in control, systems, and signal processing research, University of California, Berkeley, 1995.
• Post-doc, Helmholtz Institute, Utrecht University, the Netherlands, 1995. Work on recovery of structure and reflectance from image sequences of moving objects. Mentor: Jan J. Koenderink.
• NRC Associate, NASA Ames, 1996. Work on perceptually-based coding of images. Mentor: Andrew B. Watson.
• Member of research staff, Xerox PARC, 1997 to 2001.
• Area manager, Image Components & Services, Palo Alto Research Center, 2001-2003.
• Principal Research Scientist, Department of Brain and Cognitive Science at MIT, August 2003 to present.

Selected Publications and Presentations

Texture and Visual Search

• B. Balas, L. Nakano, & R. Rosenholtz, "A summary-statistic representation in peripheral vision explains visual crowding." Journal of Vision, 9(13):11–18, 2009.
• C. H. Attar, K. Hamburger, R. Rosenholtz, H. Gotzl, & L. Spillman, "Uniform versus random orientation in fading and filling-in" Vision research, 47(24), 3041-3051, 2007.
• R. Rosenholtz, A.L. Nagy, N. R. Bell, "The effect of background color on asymmetries in color search." Journal of Vision, 4(3), Article 9, 224-240, 2004.
• R. Rosenholtz, "Search asymmetries? What search asymmetries?" Perception & Psychophysics, 63(3), 476-489, 2001.
• R. Rosenholtz, "Visual search for orientation among heterogeneous distractors: Experimental results and implications for signal detection theory models of search." J. Experimental Psychology, 27(4), 985-999, 2001.
• R. Rosenholtz, "Significantly different textures: A computational model of pre-attentive texture segmentation."  Proc. European Conference on Computer Vision, D. Vernon (Ed.), Springer Verlag, LNCS 1843, Dublin, Ireland, pp. 197-211, June 2000.
• R. Rosenholtz, "General-purpose localization of textured image regions." Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 11, M. S. Kearns, S. A. Solla, & D. A. Cohn (eds.), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA 1999.  Also presented at SPIE 1999.
• R. Rosenholtz, "A simple saliency model predicts a number of motion popout phenomena."  Vision Research, 39, 3157-3163, 1999.
• R. Rosenholtz, "What statistics determine segmentation of orientation-defined textures?" Presented at the European Conference on Visual Perception, August 1997, and at the Optical Society of American annual meeting, 1998.
• R. Rosenholtz & R. A. Rensink, "Change detection in textured patterns."  Presented at the European Conference on Visual Perception, 1998.

User interface and information visualization

• R. Rosenholtz, A. Dorai, & R. Freeman, “Do predictions of visual perception aid design?” To appear in Trans. Applied Perception, 8(2), 2011.
• A. Raj & R. Rosenholtz, “What your design looks like to peripheral vision,” In Proceedings of the 7th Symposium on Applied Perception in Graphics and Visualization (APGV '10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 89-92, 2010.
• R. Rosenholtz, N. R. Twarog, N. Schinkel-Bielefeld, & M. Wattenberg, "An intuitive model of perceptual grouping for HCI design. " SIGCHI 2009, 1331-1340, 2009.
• R. Rosenholtz, Y. Li, & L. Nakano, "Measuring visual clutter. "Journal of Vision, 7(2):17, 1-22, 2007. doi:10.1167/7.2.17.
• R. Rosenholtz, Y. Li, J. Mansfield, Z. Jin, "Feature Congestion: a measure of display clutter."SIGCHI 2005, 761-770, 2005.
• J. P. Lewis, R. Rosenholtz, U. Neumann, and Nickson Fong, "VisualIDs: Automatic distinctive icons for desktop interfaces." SIGGRAPH 2004, 416-423, 2004.
• P. Baudisch & R. Rosenholtz, "Halo: A technique for visualizing off-screen locations." SIGCHI 2003.
• A. Woodruff, R. Rosenholtz, J. Morrison, A. Faulring, & P. Pirolli, "A comparison on the use of text summaries, plain thumbnails, and enhanced thumbnails for web search tasks." Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 53(2), 172-185, 2002.
• B. Suh, A. Woodruff, R. Rosenholtz, A. Glass, "Popout Prism: Adding perceptual principles to overview+detail document interfaces." SIGCHI 2002, 251-258, 2002.

Shape From Texture

• J. Malik & R. Rosenholtz, "Computing local surface orientation and shape from texture for curved surfaces." International Journal of Computer Vision 23(2):149-168, 1997.
• R. Rosenholtz & J. Malik, "Surface orientation from texture: Isotropy or homogeneity (or both)?" Vision Research 37(16):2283-2293, 1997.
• M. Black & R. Rosenholtz, "Robust estimation of multiple surface shapes from occluded textures." In Proc. IEEE International Symposium on Computer Vision, (Coral Gables, FL), November 1995.

Perceptually-Based Image Coding and Image Quality

• R. Rosenholtz & A. B. Watson, "Perceptual adaptive JPEG coding." IEEE Intl. Conf. on Image Processing, (Lausanne, Switzerland), Sept. 1996.
• R. Rosenholtz & A. Zakhor, "Iterative procedure for reduction of blocking effects in transform image coding." IEEE Trans. on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, vol. 2, pp. 91-95, March, 1992.
• R. Safranek, J. Johnston, & R. Rosenholtz, "A perceptually tuned sub-band image coder." Proc. SPIE, vol 1249, pp. 284-293, 1990.

Other Work

• C. Liu, L. Sharan, E. H. Adelson, & R. Rosenholtz. Exploring features in a Bayesian framework for material recognition.Proc. Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, (San Francisco, CA), June, 2010, pp.239~246. [web page]
• R. Rosenholtz & J. Koenderink, "Affine Structure and Photometry." In Proc. Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, (San Francisco, CA), June 1996, pp. 790-795.
• A. B. Watson & R. Rosenholtz, "A Rorschach test for visual classification strategies." Presented at the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology conference, 1998.

Software

• How cluttered is my display? MATLAB code for generating color and contrast "clutter maps".
• What are the salient regions of my web page? Check here.

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Last updated (January, 2011).

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