Samia Shafique
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Samia Shafique

Thank you for taking an interest in my profile. I am a final-year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California Irvine (UCI). My research area is Computer Vision and I work on projects encompassing multimodal image retrieval, depth estimation, intrinsic image decomposition, and domain adaptation under the supervision of Professor Charless Fowlkes

Take a look at my recent work published in WACV 2023!


Resume

sshafiqu AT uci DOT edu

Research

S Shafique, S Kong, CC Fowlkes, "CriSp: Leveraging Tread Depth Maps for Enhanced Crime-Scene Shoeprint Matching", in the 18th European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) 2024

Investigating crime-scene shoeprints to identify the make and model of the shoe that left a print can help narrow down suspects of a crime. We 

Introduce concept of matching crime-scene shoeprints to tread depth maps, aiming to facilitate forensic investigation and criminal justice.

• Propose a new benchmark consisting of a new dataset and retrieval-based evaluation protocols, allowing fair comparisons against previous methods.

• Learn feature representation from cross-domain, noisy, and occluded crime-scene prints

Develop a spatially-aware matching method named CriSp, which demonstrates superior performance over existing methods in both shoeprint matching and image retrieval tailored to this specific task.


S Shafique, B Kong, S Kong, CC Fowlkes, "Creating a Forensic Database of Shoeprints from Online Shoe Tread Photos", in IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV) 2023. 

To aid the study of crime-scene shoeprints, we propose to create a database of footwear impressions that cover the large and growing number of distinct shoe models by leveraging shoe-tread photos collected by online retailers. For this project, we

• Render a synthetic dataset of shoe-treads with ground-truth intrinsics from shoeprint images

• Design and train a CNN for image decomposition into albedo, depth, normal, and light

• Learn from unlabeled real data using intrinsic image decomposition and domain adaptation

• Outperform relevant state-of-the-art methods (e.g., RIN, CyCADA)

• Build a large-scale database of shoe-treads with RGB photo, depth, and shoeprint information

Albedo Segmentation for Single Objects

Estimate the reflectance given single images. We find that many everyday objects (such as shoes, dresses, etc) consist of only a handful of colors. In this project, we segment images of such objects using a variation of the Mean Shift algorithm to obtain a reflectance map. 

Pin Sequence Generation for String Art

Inspired by Petros Vrellis, we produce threaded recreations of images. The core technical challenge is to find a pin sequence through which to wound a thread given a loom with pins along its circumference. 


S Shafique, ME Ali, "Recommending Most Popular Travel Path within a Region of Interest from Historical Trajectory Data", ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Mobile Geographic Information Systems, MobiGIS, 2016.  

We propose a method to extract the most popular travel path within a Region of Interest (ROI) from historical Flicker photo uploads. 

• Challenge: user trajectories are inaccurate and incomplete

Method: rephrase trajectories into smaller parts and eliminate noisy points

Posters and Publications

Publications

Poster Presentations


Work Experience

Graduate Research Assistant, Department of Computer Science, University of California Irvine

June 2019 - Present

As a Graduate Research Assistant (GSR), I work with Professor Charless Fowlkes at the Computer Vision lab at UC Irvine. My research work focuses on aiding investigators with crime-scene shoeprint analysis and encompasses depth prediction, domain adaptation, and multimodal image retrieval. 

I have created a large-scale synthetic database of shoes with detailed tread information by predicting depth from shoe-tread images downloaded from online retailers. The make and model of crime-scene shoeprints are identified by matching the prints to our curated database and retrieving the most similar shoes. 

For these projects, I have rendered a large-scale synthetic dataset and collected real datasets for training and evaluation. I have also analyzed different state-of-the-art networks extensively and proposed new methods that outperform them. 

Projects I have worked on as a GSR are listed here.

PhD Software Engineering Intern, Uber

June 2023 - September 2023

I studied document understanding to automate fraud detection. Here are a few things I have gained experience with during the course of the internship:

ICS Student Representative, DECADE, University of California Irvine

September 2019 - September 2021

The Diverse Educational Community and Doctoral Experience (DECADE) aims to create a warm and inclusive climate for students at the University of California, Irvine. As the Student Representative of the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) at UC Irvine, I helped in organizing events and initiatives involving faculty for a supportive environment for all graduate students. 

Teaching Assistant, Information and Computer Sciences, University of California Irvine

September 2017 - June 2019

I was responsible for both Bachelor's and Master's level courses including Computer Vision, Programming, and Computational Photography. As a Teaching Assistant (TA) I assisted students with course objectives, conducted exams, and graded scripts among other things. A full list of courses I was TA for is available here.

Platform Engineering Intern, Supplyframe

June 2018 - September 2018

I worked on various aspects of the Polydyne software (a product of Supplyframe) including designing and implementing 3 features from scratch. The features are a generic module for exporting data, a generic progress display page, and a scheduled background task to clean up old files from the cloud storage used by the software. In addition to these, I have worked on bug fixes and minor improvements in the software.

Lecturer, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, United International University

May 2016 - May 2017

As a lecturer in the Computer Science department, my primary task was to design and instruct theory and laboratory courses on Operating Systems, Graphics, Algorithms, and Digital Logic Design. In addition to this, I have volunteered to be a Judge for projects at Project Showcasing, UIU CSE Festival 2017, and an Instructor and Problem Setter at ICT Olympiad and UIU Programming Camp 2016. A list of my activities is available here.

Vice President, June 2014 - February 2016

Event Director, May 2014 - May 2015

I am a Founding Member of Bangladeshi Women in Computer Science in Engineering. While serving as a Vice President and Event Director there, I organized events to encourage women toward higher studies and career pursuit in STEM. My activities included motivating students to participate in academic research, competitions, development work, etc. It was also my immense pleasure to initiate a formal 3-tier mentoring program to help undergraduate students learn from experienced seniors and alumni.

Details

Awards and Scholarships

Awards


Scholarships


Artwork

Here's a sneak peak into my world of art! Visit my album for more.

Bangladesh Village Scene

Medium: Poster

Old London Streets

Mediium: Oil

Tranquility

Medium: Poster

Grief

Medium: Poster

Freshness

Medium: Poster

The Bright Side

Medim: Pastel

Bloom

Medium: Poster

Grapes

Medium: Pencil