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.

The spring semester is in full swing, and as WNCG continues on the forefront of research, the group has welcomed a new director. Professor Constantine Caramanis began his three-year term as WNCG Director at the start of the new calendar year. Prior to that, he served as the group’s associate director. With Caramanis stepping into the new role, Professor Alex Dimakis was chosen among WNCG faculty to serve as associate director. WNCG’s leadership system allows the associate director to learn the ropes over the course of the term before serving their own term as director. 

This Spring, WNCG welcomes Intel, NEC, and Western Digital as the newest WNCG Industrial Affiliates Program members. All three companies enter as Level 2 members. Since WNCG’s founding, the Industrial Affiliates Program has played a vital role in the group’s success. It facilitates “cooperation and mutual assistance” between WNCG and Affiliate companies. This collaboration between academia and industry embodies the group’s mission to “support research, provide highly relevant education and opportunities, [and] promote technical innovation, imagination and entrepreneurship.”

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.

Each year, in conjunction with the Texas Wireless Summit, WNCG hosts a board meeting for its Industrial Affiliate members. This meeting invites affiliates to weigh in on current and future research directions and provides them with direct access to students for recruitment and research purposes. Affiliate members also receive sneak peeks into current faculty research.

Every few years, WNCG welcomes a new Director and Associate Director from among its faculty ranks. With an academic culture that encourages openness and research collaborations among equals, the rotation of Directors provides each faculty member with the opportunity to lead WNCG.

The annual WNCG Board Meeting brings together Industrial Affiliates, Board Members, Students and Faculty to share research and successes of the previous year, as well as to discuss the future of WNCG. Two representatives from each affiliate member company attend to keep up-to-date with the latest happenings and groundbreaking research in WNCG. 

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..”