I started working at Tandent Vision Science about a month ago. I absolutely love the work, the people, and the office! The company focuses on computer vision, and recently published a release called Lightbrush. The software is amazing: in a nutshell, you can separate all the shadows in an image with one click:
I think this is incredible: so many computer vision tasks are limited by illumination variations. Lightbrush provides a fundamental first step by making the image illumination-invariant. As such, it can be used as a natural preprocessing step in all computer vision pipelines, and makes most recognition applications much simpler. Anyone with experience dealing with images for the purpose of the 3 R's (Recognition, Reconstruction, Registration) will see the incredible benefit of this software.
Besides, I am a big fan of photoshop, and I know a feature such as this one would be revolutionary! I can't count how many times I've seen awful photoshopped images due to incoherent lighting.
Apparently Lightbrush gained huge attention from texture artists and high level graphics artists (at Pixar notably) so the product is geared towards a very specialized crowd. Too bad, I personally think the average user would have a blast playing with this product.
I've been working on improving the machinery - can't talk about it! - and it still blows my mind that this is possible with minimal user input... There are many aspects that I have to take into account in my tasks, such as keeping the user in mind with respect to user interaction complexity, speed (texture artists work with gigantic images).
I'm working with 2 very friendly Carnegie Mellon alumni. We each have our separate offices (with a REAL DOOR - something I missed at other workplaces I spent time at) and has a very cozy homey feel, much different from the old functional cubicle. I'm definitely loving the work here.
