Ruth Rosenholtz Principal Research Scientist Dept. of Brain and Cognitive Sciences 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 Downloads How cluttered is my display? MATLAB code for generating color and contrast "clutter maps". Coming soon: MATLAB code for generating saliency maps according to the Statistical Saliency Model for bottom-up visual search. Back to top Last updated (October, 2003).

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