Draft:George Wolberg

= George Wolberg = George Wolberg (born February 25, 1964) is an American computer scientist, academic, artist, and inventor. He is a Professor of Computer Science at the City College of New York, and a co-founder of PageFlip, NailPoint Art (dba Wolberg Studio), and Vizilu. He is noted for his pioneering work on image warping and morphing, and his seminal monograph, Digital Image Warping.

Early life and education
Wolberg was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina on February 25, 1964, to Saul and Elaine Wolberg. In 1967, his family emigrated to the US, settling in Elmhurst, Queens. After graduating from Stuyvesant High School in 1981, Wolberg attended Cooper Union, majoring in electrical engineering. He earned his Bachelor of Engineering and Master of Engineering degrees from Cooper Union in May 1985 and November 1985, respectively. Wolberg received his PhD in Computer Science from Columbia University in 1990. His doctoral dissertation, entitled "Separable Image Warping: Implications and Techniques," was completed under the supervision of Terrance Boult.

Career
Wolberg's interest in image processing and computer graphics stemmed from his summer internships at Bell Labs (Murray Hill, NJ) in 1983 and 1984. Under the direction of Theo Pavlidis, he worked on image restoration and the PED point editor graphics system for the Bell Labs Blit bitmap terminal.

While conducting his doctoral research, Wolberg did internship work at IBM TJ Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights and Hawthorne, New York. He also consulted at Fantastic Animation Machine in New York, developing image processing software that was used in computer animation sequences for the 1987 Clio Awards and the 1988 Olympics, as well as many television commercials.

After completing his PhD work at Columbia, Wolberg joined the Department of Computer Science at the City College of New York in 1990. He also served as an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University (1990-2005 and 2023). Alongside his academic career, Wolberg launched the following companies.

In 2002, Wolberg co-founded PageFlip, Inc. to design, manufacture, and commercialize superior hands-free page turning technology for the benefit of musicians and avid readers. PageFlip is now a leading manufacturer of Bluetooth pedals for amateur and professional musicians worldwide.

In 2003, Wolberg co-founded Brainstorm Technology LLC to develop 3D photography software solutions for building 3D models of urban structures from laser range scanners and photographs. The software was available as a plugin to Google SketchUp.

In 2017, Wolberg co-founded NailPoint Art LLC (dba Wolberg Studio) to design and produce 3D artwork made from thousands of pin nails. Wolberg refers to the artform as "pintillism" since it achieves a pointillistic effect akin to image stippling using pins at varying densities to recreate image tonality. The artwork has been featured in galleries in London, Miami, and New York.

In 2021, Wolberg co-founded Vizilu, Inc. to manufacture and commercialize an innovative visual illusion picture frame. The product leverages user photos and presents them in a picture frame that exploits contradictory visual cues to illicit a mesmerizing illusion of motion.

Research
Wolberg is known for his contributions in the fields of image processing, computer graphics, and computer vision. He has written extensively on warping, morphing, scattered data interpolation, image registration, image mosaics, 3D modeling from photographs, and visual effects.

Warping and morphing
Wolberg is a pioneer in the area of image morphing, a powerful visual effects tool depicting the fluid transformation of one digital image into another. He authored Digital Image Warping, the first comprehensive book on warping and morphing. The homography code from his book was used by Adobe Photoshop for perspective cloning. His work on scattered data interpolation using multilevel B-splines  found use in state-of-the-art morphing algorithms that were integrated into Apple's Shake and Final Cut Pro software.

Wolberg also developed the Polymorph algorithm for warping among multiple images to permit morphed images to be derived from more than two images at once. Polymorph furnishes a powerful tool for image composition to seamlessly blend and manipulate facial features derived from various input images.

Wolberg introduced an algorithm for warping 2D images of garments onto target mannequins of arbitrary poses. The software enables an online shopper to drag and drop selected articles of clothing onto a single mannequin to configure and visualize outfits. This system has retargeted thousands of images for retailers to establish virtual dressing rooms for their online customers.

Image registration
Wolberg introduced the log-polar registration algorithm to recover large similarity transformations (rotation/scale/translation) and moderate perspective deformations among image pairs. Although log-polar techniques had been used in the Fourier-Mellin transform to accommodate limited scale and rotation in the frequency domain, its use in the spatial domain to register images subjected to very large scale changes and arbitrary rotation had not yet been exploited. Subpixel accuracy was achieved through the use of a nonlinear least squares optimization module applied after the log-polar registration brought disparate images into close alignment.

Mosaic software
Wolberg led the development of the Tylist software (formerly known as Tesserae) for Artaic. Tylist is used by Artaic's mosaic designers to accurately design and digitally manipulate mosaic imagery prior to fabrication. The software enables Artaic's design team to design and render their mosaic artwork, while easily coordinating with their robotic manufacturing system. Designers and artists can choose from an array of options, including tile type, color, size and grout type. This increases design flexibility and enables exact customization down to the last tile.

Wolberg also developed a novel algorithm to transform digital images into renderings of traditional hand-cut mosaics. This effect is achieved by recovering free-form feature curves from the image and laying rows of tiles along these curves. Composition rules are applied to merge these tiles into an intricate jigsaw that conforms to classical mosaic styles. Mosaic rendering offers the user flexibility over every aspect of this craft, including tile arrangement, shapes, and colors. The result is a system that makes this wonderful craft more flexible and widely accessible than previously possible.

Photorealistic modeling of large-scale scenes
The photorealistic modeling of large-scale scenes, such as urban structures, requires a fusion of range sensing technology and traditional digital photography. Wolberg developed a system that integrates automated 3D-to-3D and 2D-to-3D registration techniques, with multiview geometry to produce photorealistic 3D models of large-scale urban scenes with minimal human interaction.

Photo-centric urban 3D modeling
Wolberg led the development of PhotoSketch, a SketchUp plugin for photorealistic 3D modeling of urban scenes. Although classical algorithms such as multiview stereo and laser range scanners are traditional sources for detailed 3D models of existing structures, they generate heavyweight models that are not appropriate for the streaming data that popular navigation applications leverage. Instead, lightweight models as produced by interactive image-based tools such as PhotoSketch are better suited for this domain. The contribution of PhotoSketch is that it merges the benefits of multiview geometry, an intuitive sketching interface, and dynamic texture mapping to produce lightweight photorealistic 3D models of buildings.

Pintillism
Wolberg pioneered a new artform in which an image is reproduced exclusively from tens of thousands of pin nails. The technique transforms a digital image into an irregular dot pattern to achieve a pointillistic effect akin to image stippling. Rather than leave the dots as ink on canvas, each dot is replaced with a pin nail to realize an innovative 3D version of pointillism, which Wolberg refers to as "pintillism." The premium artwork captures fine details and subtle tonality in any photograph by varying the pin density. Digital technology and robotics are utilized to produce unique pintillism artwork of unsurpassed quality.

Reverse perspective
Wolberg developed a product called Vizilu that is based on the concept of reverse perspective, as popularized by the artist Patrick Hughes. The Vizilu 3D picture frame allows users to install photos that become the centerpiece of kinetic wall art. The contradictory visual cues embedded in the frame make the photos appear to move in 3D as a viewer sways to the left and right. Historically, the graphics that spans the surface of reverse perspective art has been limited to hand-painted or printed artwork that presented no opportunity for the consumer to alter. The Vizilu frame is unique as it displays a photo gallery theme that includes regions in which user photos can be inserted to offer a satisfying level of customization. This introduces an opportunity to leverage photos as the centerpiece of a mesmerizing visual illusion in an artform that has resisted customization.

Awards
Wolberg is the recipient of the National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award (1991), the CCNY Outstanding Teaching Award (1997), and the Mayor's Award for Excellence in Science and Technology (1999), which was awarded by NYC Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.