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.

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.

Prof. Robert Heath delivered a keynote speech at IEEE Communication Society’s 2018 International Conference on Communications (IEEE ICC).

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.

WNCG Prof. Robert W. Heath, Jr. recently received the 2017 IEEE Marconi Prize Paper Award in Wireless Communications for his work entitled “Spatially Sparse Precoding in Millimeter Wave MIMO Systems,” published in the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications in March 2014. The IEEE Guglielmo Marconi Best Paper Award is an annual award for an original paper in the field of Wireless Communications published in the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications. Only papers published within the last three calendar years are eligible for this award. 

Robert Heath, Texas ECE professor, has received the European Association for Signal Processing (EURASIP) 2017 Technical Achievement Award for Significant Contributions to Signal Processing in MIMO Communication Systems. EURASIP serves to further the efforts of researchers by providing a learned and professional platform for dissemination and discussion of all aspects of signal processing.

Robert Heath, Texas ECE professor, has received the European Association for Signal Processing (EURASIP) 2017 Technical Achievement Award for Significant Contributions to Signal Processing in MIMO Communication Systems. EURASIP serves to further the efforts of researchers by providing a learned and professional platform for dissemination and discussion of all aspects of signal processing.

Prof. Robert Heath is part of a team that was selected as one of three finalists for the prestigious European Inventor Award in the Non-European Countries category. Robert was part of the team led by his PhD advisor Prof. Arogyaswami Paulraj of Stanford University that was recognized for its contributions to Faster Wireless Connectivity (MIMO).  Robert and his team are in very good company: another finalist this year is Bob Langer, MIT, who is well-known for his contributions to  biotechnology and for arguably being the most successful serial academic entrepreneur.

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..”