Prof. Adelson has published widely in the areas of human vision, computer vision, and computer graphics. His current research focuses on artificial touch sensing for robotics.
Prof. Adelson is well known for contributions to multiscale image representation (such as the Laplacian pyramid) and basic concepts in early vision such as motion energy and steerable filters (honored by the IEEE Computer Society’s Helmholtz Prize, 2013). His work on the neural mechanisms of motion perception was honored with the Rank Prize in Optoelectronics (1992). His work on layered representations for motion won the IEEE Computer Society’s Longuet-Higgins Award (2005). He introduced the plenoptic function, and built the first plenoptic camera. He has done pioneering work on the problems of material perception in human and machine vision. He has produced some well known illusions such as the Checker-Shadow Illusion. Prof. Adelson has recently developed a novel technology for artificial touch sensing, called GelSight, which converts touch to images, and which enables robots to have tactile sensitivity exceeding that of human skin.