Saumya Rawat, a 4th year B.Tech (Hons) student was 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 during 5 – 7 February, 2018. 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 color 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 color correction, while maintaining the overall realism of the scene. 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.”
