Clarkson University Assistant Professor Natasha Banerjee was selected as a finalist for the 2015 World Technology Awards for her 3D object manipulation research.

Banerjee was nominated for her work on 3D object manipulation in a single photograph. Her research focuses on leveraging large datasets of 3D models and environment illuminations with fast cloud-based computations to provide full-range, near real-time 3D control over objects in images.

As people get closer to representing the real world in photographs, the task of perceptually distinguishing real and altered images can become challenging, Banerjee said.

Banerjee is interested in performing research on how physical inaccuracies in altered images or statistical differences between real and altered images are used to tell them apart.

"A lot of people are using Photoshop now because it's becoming mainstream, and everyone has a camera on their smartphone," she said. "Not only does everyone want to take a photograph, but they also want to creatively control their photographs. We have taken this to the next level by allowing users to manipulate photographed objects in three dimensions."

Banerjee said 3D object manipulation technology can be applied to fields such as forensics and medicine to help understand the information in an image taken by the camera. A single snapshot of a scene would be able to help researchers simulate a bullet's trajectory or create an accident reconstruction.

"What we've found is that, while current photo-editing tools limit editing to 2-D, people want to be able break out of the 2-D restriction, grab the object in an image and move it around in 3-D as if in the real world," she said.

Banerjee’s work has also received Popular Science magazine’s Best of What’s New Award for 2014 and has been featured in the New York Times.

She was interviewed for her work by Inside Science TV in August 2015.

The 2015 World Technology Awards are presented by the World Technology Network each year to “outstanding innovators in technology,” according to a press release from Clarkson.

World Technology Network is a “curated membership community” comprised of the world's individuals and organizations in science, technology and related fields, the release said.