Rakesh “Teddy” Kumar

Vice President, Information and Computing Sciences Director, Center for Vision Technologies

Rakesh “Teddy” Kumar, Ph.D., is director of the Center for Vision Technologies in Information and Computing Sciences at SRI International. In this role, he is responsible for leading research and development in the fields of computer vision, robotics, image processing, computer graphics, and visualization algorithms and systems for government and commercial clients.

In 2013, Kumar was honored with the Outstanding Achievement in Technology Development award from his alma mater, University of Massachusetts Amherst, School of Computer Science. He has received the Sarnoff Presidents Award in 2009 and Sarnoff Technical Achievement awards for his work in registration of multi-sensor, multi-dimensional medical images and alignment of video to three-dimensional scene models. The paper “Stable Vision-Aided Navigation for Large-Area Augmented Reality” co-authored by him received the best paper award in the IEEE Virtual Reality 2011 conference.

Kumar has served on NSF review and DARPA ISAT panels. He has also been an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. He has co-authored more than 60 research publications, and received more than 50 patents. Kumar was a principal founder for multiple spin-off companies from Sarnoff Corporation, including VideoBrush, LifeClips, and SSG.

Kumar received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. His M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering is from State University of New York at Buffalo, and his B.Tech in Electrical Engineering is from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India.

Recent publications

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Graph Mapper: Efficient Visual Navigation by Scene Graph Generation (5/18/2022) - We propose a method to train an autonomous agent to learn to accumulate a 3D scene graph representation of its…

SASRA: Semantically-aware Spatio-temporal Reasoning Agent for Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments (5/18/2022) - This paper presents a novel approach for the Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) task in continuous 3D environments.

Head-Worn Markerless Augmented Reality Inside a Moving Vehicle (3/12/2022) - This paper describes a system that provides general head-worn outdoor AR capability for the user inside a moving vehicle.

Global Heading Estimation for Wide Area Augmented Reality Using Road Semantics for Geo-referencing (10/8/2021) - We present a method to estimate global camera head- ing by associating directional information from road segments in the camera…

Long-Range Augmented Reality with Dynamic Occlusion Rendering (8/27/2021) - This paper addresses the problem of fast and accurate dynamic occlusion reasoning by real objects in the scene for large…

MaAST: Map Attention with Semantic Transformers for Efficient Visual Navigation (5/30/2021) - By using our novel attention schema and auxiliary rewards to better utilize scene semantics, we outperform multiple baselines trained with…