IIIT-H student’s ‘Find Me A Sky’ paper gets attention at Bangkok

HYDERABAD: Saumya Rawat, a fourth year B.Tech (Hons) student at IIIT-H,  has earned bragging rights of being the only undergraduate student to present her paper: “Find me a sky: a data-driven method for color-consistent sky search & replacement” at the 24th International Conference on Multimedia Modeling held in Bangkok on February 5-7, 2018. The 22-year-old traces the beginnings of her fascination towards computers back to high school when she first began dabbling in C++. But it wasn’t until her course on Computer Graphics in the sophomore year that she was drawn towards Computer Vision.

The far-reaching potential of the field and its myriad applications in the practical world found Saumya at the Center for Visual Information Technology (CVIT). And opting for the Honours programme, where a student can do research for four additional credits each semester, seemed like the most natural thing to do. At CVIT, Saumya was introduced to a research problem by Rajvi Shah, a PhD student who is being mentored by Prof. P.J. Narayan. 

As a photographer herself, Saumya says, “I had faced the problem where I was often unable to take good photos due to overexposure or the lack of an aesthetic sky at the time of photographing a beautiful scene.” But manually replacing such skies leads to a situation where one has to colour correct the foreground after replacement to make it consistent with the new sky. Co-authored by fellow B.Tech student, Sidhharth Gairola, Saumya’s paper proposes a data-driven method to automate the process of sky replacement and colour correction, while maintaining the overall realism of the scene.

Publishing And Presenting
Saumya was encouraged to submit her paper to the Multimedia Modelling conference. It is a matter of pride that out of 158 full papers submitted, 46 were selected for oral presentation and the overall acceptance rate was 47%. “The environment in the research labs at IIIT-H is extremely professional which provides equal opportunity to every student to carry out their work to their full potential irrespective of gender,”avers Saumya.

The CVIT lab provides grants to authors to attend a conference subject to approval of person in charge. Saumya not only applied for the CVIT travel grant, but also applied for and obtained an ACM-W (Association for Computing Machinery - Council for Women in Computing) scholarship that “provides support for women undergraduate and graduate students in Computer Science and related programs to attend research conferences.”