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. 

TWS 2019 co-organizers Edison Thomaz and Nanshu Lu have announced the theme of this year’s Summit: Connectivity and Sensing at the Human-Machine Frontier. The event will highlight advances and opportunities at the intersection of human-centered computing, sensing and connectivity. Sessions and panels will focus on wearables, virtual and mixed reality, bio-interfaces, and perception. We will explore the challenges and demands of the communication infrastructure required to support and enhance devices and experiences. WNCG will host the event on November 12, 2019.

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.

WNCG will host the 17th Texas Wireless Summit (TWS) on November 12, 2019.  Planning for TWS has just begun, but you can expect an exciting list of high-profile industry and academia speakers, as in previous Summits. Past events have typically been attended by more than 350 leading members of industry and academia each year.

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.

The 2017 Texas Wireless Summit (TWS) will take place November 6-7, 2017, and feature sessions and panels on diverse topics including millimeter wave networks, the future of automated vision and navigation, software defined networking and applications of machine learning. This year’s Summit will be a very special event marking the fifteenth anniversary of the Wireless Networking and Communications Group (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..”