News

WNCG students Marius Facktor and Abhinau Venkataramanan and WNCG alumnus Praful Gupta from Prof. Al Bovik’s Laboratory for Image & Video Engineering (LIVE) have been named Phase 2 winners in the Enhancing Computer Vision for Public Safety Challenge. The challenge is hosted by the Public Safety Communications Research Division of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The competition aims to support public safety missions by advancing computer vision algorithms and no-reference (NR) metrics that assess image or video quality.

WNCG student Ian Roberts has been awarded the National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship. The NSF program identifies researchers “anticipated to become knowledge experts who can contribute significantly to research, teaching, and innovations in science and engineering.”

First-year graduate student Joshua Ebenezer has received the Nilanjan Ganguly Memorial Award for his undergraduate thesis on haze- and fog-affected images and videos. The award designates the “best B.Tech thesis in the Electronics & Electrical Communication Engineering Department” at IIT Khargapur and is given annually to a single student. The award also includes a cash prize for the recipient from the Ganguly family. 

WNCG Alumnus Vishal Monga has led two teams of researchers to success at the New Trends in Image Restoration and Enhancement (NTIRE) worldwide competition. Monga received his Ph.D.EE from Texas ECE in 2005, advised by Prof. Brian L. Evans at WNCG. He now runs the Information Processing & Algorithms Laboratory at Penn State’s College of Engineering and holds the title of Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Every Spring, Texas ECE’s Awards Banquet celebrates the achievements of the department’s outstanding students and faculty. Three WNCG members were among those honored at this year’s event, which was held last week on May 6. WNCG Student Ahmed Kord won the prestigious Graduate Student Excellence Award for 2018-2019. The department confers this prize annually on one graduate student who has demonstrated “high academic achievement in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.”

Texas ECE Professor Al Bovik’s neuroscience-based Visual Information Fidelity (VIF) picture quality measurement tool has been built into the core of Netflix’s quality system which controls the quality of every video streamed by Netflix to all customers world-wide. VIF is a full reference image quality assessment index that is based on natural scene statistics, and on a model of the type of image information that is extracted by the human visual system. It was developed by Prof.

While much work has been done to further image quality for cameras and smart phones in the visible light spectrum, WNCG student Todd Goodall and his advisor Prof. Bovik have expanded their research to include the quality of infrared images. “As far as Prof. Bovik and I know, no one has thoroughly studied the natural scene statistics of infrared images,” Goodall states. “Other general image statistics have been studied, but no one has considered the perceptually-relevant natural statistics..”

UT ECE alumna Yang Zhao has received a 2014 Outstanding Dissertation Award from The University of Texas at Austin graduate school. The Outstanding Dissertation Award was established in 1979 by the Graduate School to recognize exceptional work by doctoral students and to encourage the highest levels of scholarship, research, and writing.  Yang Zhao received her PhD from UT ECE in 2013 .under Prof. Andrea Alù.