David Coombs, Ph.D. 


NIST, Intelligent Systems Division 
MET B124 
Gaithersburg MD 20899 USA 

Tel: (301) 975-2865, FAX: (301) 990-9688 
<mailto:coombs@nist.gov> 
<http://isd.cme.nist.gov/staff/coombs/> 

18973 Abbotsford Circle 
Germantown MD 10876 
(301) 515-0349 




Research Objectives
______________________________________________________________________________

To design and prototype innovative systems that use computer vision to
change the way computers are used, improving robustness of existing
applications, expanding into new areas, and improving computer
interactions with the people who use them.

Dr. Coombs's interests range over computer and biological vision,
human-computer interaction, multimedia communications, real-time
systems, and robotics, with a focus on achieving robust performance. One
effort is immersive visualization of complex data and simulations. In
addition, he developed a prototype binocular telepresence system with a
wide field of view and a high-resolution inset for teleoperating a robot
crane. He has developed real-time active vision and gaze control of
camera movements to aid visual perception. This has enabled a moving
robot to keep its cameras smoothly following a nearby moving object. The
same broad principle has been applied to a robot that uses
low-resolution motion perception to steer between obstacles in a
laboratory.




Education
______________________________________________________________________________


Ph.D. Computer Science, University of Rochester (1992). Thesis:
"Real-time Gaze Holding in Binocular Robot Vision," published in part as
David Coombs and Christopher Brown. Real-time binocular smooth pursuit.
International Journal of Computer Vision, 11(2):147-164, 1993.


M.S. Computer Science, University of Rochester (1988)


B.S. with Honor Computer Science, Michigan State University (1986)




Computer Experience
______________________________________________________________________________


Skills

designing, developing, integrating and testing real-time systems for
vision, control, and visualization.



Languages

C++, C, Perl, Ada, LISP, Prolog, FORTRAN, Modula2, Pascal, assemblers



Packages and Tools

Reg Willson's version of Roger Tsai's camera calibration, RCSlib,
CAVElib, make, FrameMaker, Microsoft Office, Claris HomePage, Claris
Works, Quadralay Webworks, Photoshop



Systems

Solaris, SunOS, BSD UNIX, Irix, VxWorks, Windows, MacOS, System7, VMS,
DOS, CP/M



Networking and Communications

TCP Sockets, NML, RPC



Platforms

sparc, SGI, MC680x0, Macs, PCs, ADSP, VAX, PDP11, CYBER750, MC6800



Motor Controllers

Delta Tau PMAC, Directed Perception, TRC Labmate, Denning, Compumotor



Image processing and Modeling

WiT, VRML, Performer, Axxess, CAVELib, Mathematica, Matlab, Coreco Ultra
II, Datacube MaxVideo, Aspex PIPE, Pixar, Khoros, ImagCalc




Professional Experience
______________________________________________________________________________


Computer Scientist (1992-present)

Intelligent Systems Division (formerly Robot Systems Division), National
Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, Maryland.

Visualization and Web presence: Exploring representation and navigation
in immersive environments for visualizing data (e.g., from the unmanned
ground vehicle) and simulations (e.g., manufacturing processes and
operations with a factory, or the Hexapod machine tool). Investigated
using motorized stereo cameras as a visual telepresence system for crane
teleoperation and vehicle driving: wide and narrow field cameras
simultaneously provide wide field awareness and high resolution
precision. Took a lead role in developing the division's presence on the
web, installing several of our papers and advertising postdoctoral
research opportunities, resulting in tenures by two excellent
postdoctoral researchers in our lab.

Intelligent Vehicles: Improving autonomous mobility competence in the
Army's Demo III experimental unmanned ground vehicle program. Taking a
lead role in understanding user needs, developing algorithms, rapidly
prototyping systems, integrating systems, collecting sensor data and
evaluating algorithm performance.
<http://isd.cme.nist.gov/projects/demo-iii/>. Collected ground video
data annotated by vehicle motion parameters (GPS, INS, timestamp) and
calibrated the camera.
<http://isd.cme.nist.gov/proj/ground-video/ground-video.fm.html>. With
indoor robots, used flow features as the sole cues for robot mobility.
Low resolution motion vision over large fields of view enabled the robot
to steer safely between obstacles; active camera control simplified the
motion interpretation. Motion vision also enabled the robot to represent
its environment for planning efficient mobility. Minimal representations
achieved robust vehicle mobility. Used camera fixation to improve
negotiation of a cluttered field. These techniques resulted in
autonomous runs lasting up to 26 minutes in a cluttered laboratory. The
Unmanned Ground Vehicle Performance Evaluation suggested evaluations of
the performance of the UGV. Developed proposed procedures to evaluate
sensing systems for navigation and driving and for steering subsystems.



Senior Engineer (ATR), and Guest Researcher (NIST) (1991-1992)

Advanced Technology and Research Corporation, Laurel, Maryland, and
Robot Systems Division, National Institute of Standards and Technology,
Gaithersburg, Maryland.

The Sensory Processing and World Modeling Project developed competence
in autonomous and cooperative robot applications with a focus on robot
mobility. Computer vision provided the robot's perceptual needs, and
deliberate control of the robot's cameras aided real-time performance in
dynamic environments. Empirical laboratory work for this project
required the integration of a robot, cameras, and camera motors;
real-time image processing used the PIPE.



Research and Teaching Assistant (1986-1991)

Department of Computer Science, University of Rochester, Rochester, New
York.

Teaching: Teaching assistant for 2 semesters for graduate courses on
compilers and operating systems. Supported, administered and graded
class programming projects and lectured in recitations.

Research in vision for robots: Visual processing and motor control for
controlling the gaze of binocular robots. The thesis work focused on
holding the robot's gaze on a moving object while the robot moves (i.e.,
tracking the object with the robot's cameras). The approach exploits the
control of camera movements to simplify the visual processing that is
necessary, enabling real-time performance of the system. The real-time
vision processing was performed on Datacube MaxVideo hardware.



Research Intern (summer 1988)

Image Understanding Group, General Electric Corporate Research and
Development, Schenectady, New York.

Helped install a Pixar and displayed models on it ported from the
ImagCalc system. Also worked on using predicted object motion to speed
matching a model to a sequence of images.



Programmer/Analyst (1982-1986)

Information Processing, College of Education, Michigan State University,
East Lansing, Michigan.

Designed and developed software and configured hardware to support
office systems in a networked PC environment.



Consultant (July 1985)

Client: Prof. Evelyn Oka, Department of CEPSE, College of Education,
Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan.

Designed and developed a system to administer a test of reading
comprehension span to children.



Programmer (summer 1984)

Free Shear Flow Laboratory, Division of Engineering Research, Michigan
State University, East Lansing, Michigan.

Developed software that identified appropriate regions of data and
statistically analyzed those data.




Honors and Awards
______________________________________________________________________________


NIST Cash-in-a-Flash for excellence in leading data collection 1997 
NIST Cash-in-a-Flash for excellence in virtual collaboration 1997 
2000 Outstanding People of the 20th Century 
Who's Who in the World (1998--) 
Dictionary of International Biography (1998--) 
Who's Who in the East (1997--) 
Phi Kappa Phi 
Pi Mu Epsilon (Mathematics) 
Tau Beta Pi (Engineering) 
Honors College of Michigan State University 
National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship Honorable Mention 
National Merit Scholarship 
Michigan Competitive Scholarship 
General Electric Information Services Company Scholarship 
Bechtel Power Corporation Scholarship 
Society of Mechanical Engineers Scholarship 
Society of Die-Casting Engineers Scholarship 




Professional Activities
______________________________________________________________________________


Co-Organizer 

AAAI 1994 Spring Symposium on Physical Interaction and Manipulation 



Session Chair 

ISAS 1997 Conference Publications Chair 
ECVNet Active Vision Hardware Workshop 1995 
OSA Topical Meeting on Image Understanding and Machine Vision 1989 



Reviewer 

National Science Foundation 
Department of Commerce 
Prentice Hall 
International Journal of Computer Vision 
IEEE Journal of Robotics and Automation 
IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 
IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation 
IEEE Computational Science and Engineering 
CVGIP: Image Understanding 
Computer Vision and Image Understanding 
CVPR IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 
ICRA International Conference on Robotics and Automation 
OSA Topical Meeting on Image Understanding and Machine Vision 



Committee service 

University of Rochester Computer Science Admissions Committee 1988 
University of Rochester Computer Science Laboratory Committee 1988 



Affiliations 

Behavioral and Brain Sciences Associate 
ACM Member 
IEEE Member 





Selected Publications 
______________________________________________________________________________


Refereed Articles

[1] Theodore Camus, David Coombs, Martin Herman, Tsai-Hong Hong.
Real-time Single-workstation Obstacle Avoidance Using Only Wide-field
Flow Divergence. Videre. accepted for publication pending revision,
1998.

[2] David Coombs, Martin Herman, Tsai-Hong Hong, and Marilyn Nashman.
Real-time Obstacle Avoidance Using Central Flow Divergence and
Peripheral Flow. IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation. 14 (1)
49--59. February 1998.

[3] Sandor Szabo, David Coombs, Martin Herman, Ted Camus, and Hongche
Liu. A real-time computer vision platform for mobile robot applications.
Journal of Real-time Imaging, 2(5):315-327, October 1996.

[4] David Coombs. Sensor fusion in motion perception. Behavioral and
Brain Sciences, 17(2):317-318, June 1994.

[5] David Coombs and Christopher Brown. Real-time binocular smooth
pursuit. International Journal of Computer Vision, 11(2):147-164, 1993.

[6] Thomas Olson and David Coombs. Real-time vergence control for
binocular robots. International Journal of Computer Vision, 7(1):67-89,
November 1991.



Invited Articles

[7] Martin Herman, David Coombs, Tsai-Hong Hong, and Marilyn Nashman.
Vision-based mobility using optical flow. Robotics and Machine
Perception, SPIE's International Technical Working Group Newsletter,
3(2):4-5, September 1994.

[8] David Coombs and Steven Whitehead. Report on the AAAI 1994 spring
symposium on physical interaction and manipulation. AI Magazine, Summer
1994.

[9] David Coombs and Christopher Brown. Cooperative gaze holding in
binocular vision. IEEE Control Systems, June 1991.



Book Chapters

[10] Martin Herman, Marilyn Nashman, Tsai-Hong Hong, Henry Schneiderman,
David Coombs, Gin-Shu Young, Dani Raviv, and Albert Wavering. Minimalist
vision for navigation. In Yiannis Aloimonos, editor, Visual Navigation:
From Biological Systems to Unmanned Ground Vehicles, pages 275-316.
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997.

[11] Christopher Brown, David Coombs, and John Soong. Real-time smooth
pursuit tracking. In Andrew Blake and Alan Yuille, editors, Active
Vision, chapter 8, pages 123-136. MIT Press, 1992.



Refereed Conference Papers

[12] Ted Camus, David Coombs, Martin Herman, and Tsai-Hong Hong.
Real-time single-workstation obstacle avoidance using only wide-field
flow divergence. In Proc. of ICPR 1996, the International Conference on
Pattern Recognition, Vienna, Austria, August 1996.

[13] David Coombs, Martin Herman, Tsai-Hong Hong, and Marilyn Nashman.
Real-time obstacle avoidance using central flow divergence and
peripheral flow. In Proc. of ICCV 1995, the Fifth International
Conference on Computer Vision, Cambridge, Massachusetts, June, 1995.

[14] David Coombs and Karen Roberts. Centering behavior using peripheral
vision. In Proc. of CVPR'93, the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and
Pattern Recognition, New York, June 15-17, 1993.

[15] David Coombs and Christopher Brown. Real-time smooth pursuit
tracking for a moving binocular head. In Proc. of CVPR'92, the IEEE
Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Champaign,
Illinois, June 15-18, 1992.



Invited Conference Papers

[16] David Coombs and Karen Roberts. "Bee-bot": using peripheral optical
flow to avoid obstacles. In Proc. of the SPIE Conf. on Intelligent
Robots and Computer Vision XI: Algorithms, Techniques, and Active
Vision, Boston, Massachusetts, November 15-20, 1992.

[17] David Coombs, Ian Horswill, and Peter vonKaenel. Disparity
filtering: Proximity detection and segmentation. In Proc. of the SPIE
Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Computer Vision XI: Algorithms,
Techniques, and Active Vision, Boston, Massachusetts, November 15-20,
1992.

[18] David Coombs and Christopher Brown. Intelligent gaze control in
binocular vision. In Proc. of the Fifth IEEE International Symposium on
Intelligent Control, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, September 1990. Other
Reports

[19] David Coombs, Sandor Szabo, Martin Herman. The Annotated Ground
Video Data Collection Project. DARPA Project Report. National Institute
of Standards and Technology. Intelligent Systems Division.
<http://isd.cme.nist.gov/proj/ground-video/ground-video.fm.html>. August
1997.

[20] Elena Messina, David Coombs, Tom Kramer, John Michaloski, Fred
Proctor, Will Shackleford, Keith Stouffer, Tsung-Ming Tsai. Findings and
Recommendations for a Software Development Process. NISTIR 5989,
National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD, March
1997.

[21] David Coombs. Visual sensing for navigation and driving. In
Recommendations for Performance Evaluation of Unmanned Ground Vehicle
Technologies, chapter 3, pages 32-50. Available as NISTIR 5244, National
Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), August 1993.

[22] Dana Ballard, Christopher Brown, David Coombs, and Brian Marsh. Eye
movements and computer vision. In 1987-88 Computer Science and
Engineering Research Review. University of Rochester, Computer Science
Department, Rochester, New York, September 1987.





Selected Presentations
______________________________________________________________________________


Invited Workshop presentations

"Mobility Technology for Demo III" Demo III CTT Mobility White Paper
presentation, Demo III Inaugural Workshop, Towson, Maryland, March,
1998.

"What is Active Vision good for?" Invited talk, ECVNet Active Vision
Hardware Workshop, Le Sappey, France, February, 1995.

"Lessons from experience with robot heads at Rochester and NIST" Invited
talk, ECVNet Active Vision Hardware Workshop, Le Sappey, France,
February, 1995.

"Mechanical structure issues in robot head design" Invited talk, ECVNet
Active Vision Hardware Workshop, Le Sappey, France, February, 1995.

"Coordinated control of Active Vision systems" Invited talk, ECVNet
Active Vision Hardware Workshop, Le Sappey, France, February, 1995.

"Animate Vision at The University of Rochester." Invited talk, Unmanned
Ground Vehicle Workshop, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, May 1991. Conference
and Workshop Presentations

"Real-time obstacle avoidance using central flow divergence and
peripheral flow." ICCV 1995, the Fifth International Conference on
Computer Vision, Cambridge, Massachusetts, June, 1995.

"Chairs are no obstacles." AAAI 1994 Spring Symposium on Physical
Interaction and Manipulation, Stanford, California, March 1994.

"Exploiting gaze holding for visual following and robot mobility." Sigma
Xi Postdoctoral Poster Presentation. NIST chapter, Gaithersburg,
Maryland, February 1994.

"RoboVac and the cat will get along famously." AAAI 1993 Fall Symposium
on Instantiating Real-World Agents, Raleigh, North Carolina, October,
1993.

"Centering Behavior Using Peripheral Vision." CVPR'93, the IEEE
Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, New York, New
York, June 1993.

"`Bee-bot' takes the middle of the road." SPIE Conference on Intelligent
Robots and Computer Vision XI: Algorithms, Techniques, and Active
Vision, Boston, Massachusetts, November 1992.

"Disparity filtering: proximity detection and segmentation." SPIE
Conference on Intelligent Robots and Computer Vision XI: Algorithms,
Techniques, and Active Vision, Boston, Massachusetts, November 1992.

"Smooth pursuit for binocular robots." CVPR'92, the IEEE Conference on
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Champaign, Illinois, June 1992.

"How do eye movements influence vision?" AAAI 1992 Spring Symposium on
the Control of Selective Perception, Stanford, California, March 1992.

"Intelligent gaze control in binocular vision." Fifth IEEE International
Symposium on Intelligent Control, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, September
1990.

"Gaze control and segmentation." AAAI-90 Workshop on Qualitative Vision,
Boston, Massachusetts, July 1990.

"Gaze control and segmentation." University of Rochester Industrial
Affiliates, Rochester, New York, May 1990.

"Tracking objects with eye movements." Optical Society of America
Topical Meeting on Image Understanding and Machine Vision, North
Falmouth, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, June 1989.



Invited Seminar Presentations

"Robot Gaze Control and Mobility Using Minimalist Vision." Maryland
Robotics Seminar, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland,
October, 1994.

"Robot Gaze Control and Mobility Using Minimalist Vision." Artificial
Intelligence Lab Seminar, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Cambridge, Massachusetts, October, 1994.

"Exploiting Gaze Holding for Visual Following and Robot Mobility." GRASP
Lab Seminar, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,
June, 1994.

"Exploiting Gaze Holding for Visual Following and Robot Mobility."
Robotics Seminar, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, May, 1994.

"Biologically-inspired Active Vision." Robotics Seminar, Columbia
University, New York, New York, February 1994.

"Biologically-inspired Active Vision." Computer Science Seminar,
Colorado School of Mines, Golden, Colorado, December 1993.

"Biologically-Inspired Robot Vision." Computer Vision Guest Lecture, The
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, April 1993.

"Real-time gaze holding in binocular robot vision." Computer Science
Seminar, University of Rochester, Computer Science Department, December
1991.

"Real-time gaze holding in binocular robot vision." Robotics Seminar,
Hughes Research Laboratories, A.I. Center, Malibu, California, June
1991.

"Real-time gaze holding in binocular robot vision." Computer Vision
Seminar, David Sarnoff Research Center, Princeton, New Jersey, June
1991.

"Real-time gaze holding in binocular robot vision." Robotics Seminar,
Martin-Marietta Corporation Space Systems, Denver, Colorado, June 1991.

"Real-time gaze holding in binocular robot vision." Computer Vision
Seminar, NIST, Robot Systems Division, Gaithersburg, Maryland, June
1991.

"Real-time gaze holding in binocular robot vision." Robotics Seminar,
The MITRE Corporation, Autonomous Systems Group, McLean, Virginia, June
1991.

"Real-time gaze holding in binocular robot vision." Computer Vision
Seminar, Alfred I. duPont Institute, Wilmington, Delaware, May 1991.

"Real-time gaze holding in binocular robot vision." Computer Science
Seminar, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada, May 1991.

"Real-time gaze holding in binocular robot vision." Computer Science
Seminar, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, April 1991.





Advisors
______________________________________________________________________________


Christopher Brown, Dana Ballard, Randal Nelson (Department of Computer
Science, University of Rochester),

W. Michael King (Department of Neurology, University of Mississippi
Medical Center; previously at Department of Physiology, University of
Rochester)





References available on request
______________________________________________________________________________