Computer Vision News - February 2017

a hobby. In the middle of that, I was looking for a Master’s thesis. I met with several people, but nothing appealed to me. Back then there wasn’t Facebook, so I frequently read an internet diving forum. Then I read in an Israeli diving forum about someone doing research on underwater imaging in electrical engineering. Yoav Schechner became my PhD advisor. This is how I started. Did you always want to work with and study technology? I guess the answer is yes. In high school, I also studied technology and computers. Who inspired you? Parents? Teachers? Or was it something completely natural? I think it was inspired by my father, although I was probably inclined to it in the first place. My father is an electrical engineer. Since I was young I helped him solder stuff, and he encouraged it. He bought me one of those Commodore computers, you probably remember them. Does your army service have anything to do with your path in science? Not really, as I said in high school I knew that I wanted to study technology. In the army service, I didn’t want to do technology because I knew that I would do that for the rest of my life, so I wanted to do something else. So your army service was a vacation from technology? [ laughs ] Most of our female readers have never been in the army. Could you tell us a little bit about what it’s like to be a woman in the army? I was a commander of new female recruits. I was trained to use a gun but I never was a combat soldier. Later I became an officer commanding the new recruits. I didn’t go to war or anything like that. I was responsible for people’s training. I think it was a positive experience for me. I learned a lot about working with people, commanding, arranging schedules, and having a large responsibility. Is it difficult to be a female soldier? I think it depends on what you do. It was challenging, but I don’t think it was because I was a woman. I think it’s challenging for the guys as well. Probably more… Tell us about your current work. I run a lab for marine imaging in the School of Marine Sciences at the University of Haifa. I work in two main directions. One is algorithms for underwater computer vision. With computer vision in underwater images, we try to reconstruct the visibility, the color, 3D and so on and recover information from underwater images. This is different from standard computer vision, because the water has a great optical effect on the images Computer Vision News Women in Computer Vision 13 Women in Science Fluorescent corals - In the last 3 decades up to 80% of coral coverage has been lost in the Caribbean and up to 50% in the Indo-Pacific