Monthly Archives: February 2015

MCL Director, Professor C.-C. Jay Kuo, was invited to be a speaker and panelist in the Innovation Theme session “Big Data: Challenges and Opportunities in Computing and Communications” of the IEEE International Conference on Networking and Communications (ICNC), held in Anaheim, California, February 16-19, 2015. ICNC 2015 was technically co-sponsored by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Communications Society, financially sponsored by Technology Innovation Association. It is alternately held in Hawaii and California every year.

Professor Kuo pointed out two main challenges in big data – the filtering problem and the prediction problem. The filtering problem refers to how to find useful and relevant information from a huge amount of data. Although data is in huge amount, the information of interest is little. A lot of noise exists and buries the important information. Professor Kuo used “finding a needle in a haystack” as an analogy. One immediate scientific method to address this problem is to develop a more advanced search engine for image/video exploiting computer vision techniques. The prediction problem asked how to predict future trends, for instance, to predict the explosion of a large flu or the results of political elections, based on existing data. Professor Kuo emphasized that we need to find out “does big data truly help increase prediction accuracy or does it in fact confuse people with noise”.

In addition, Professor Kuo, in his speech, addressed one challenge in big visual data communication, that is, the broadband video is too expensive to be transmitted in a massive distributed manner. He proposed an alternative, which is to exploit “semantic compression” where the computer vision technology can be used to tag video contents so that, instead of sending video, only meta data such as tags [...]

Ms. Lina Jin started her PhD study from January 2011 at the Computing Imaging group, Department of Signal Processing, Tampere University of Technology, Finland. Since 2011, She has been co-supervised by Prof. C.-C. Jay Kuo from the University of Southern California. From October 2013 to December 2014, she has been working at Prof. Kuo’s Media Communications Lab as a visiting scholar.

Congratulations to Lina Jin for passing her public examination on January 30, 2015. The title of her dissertation is “Perceptual Quality Assessment for Visual Signal”. Her dissertation was pre-examined by Prof. Patrick LeCallet (Université de Nantes/Ecole Polytechnique de l’Université de Nantes, France) and Prof. Weisi Lin (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore). The opponent is Prof. Mårten Sjöström from Mid Sweden University, Sweden.

With the rapid growth of information technology and the Internet, image and video have become one part of our everyday life and their quality is of prime importance for numerous applications. The aim of realistic digital image and video is to create accurate, high quality imagery, which faithfully represents the physical environment. The ultimate goal is to create images that are perceptually indistinguishable from the actual scene. Thus, the automatic evaluation of image and video quality plays a critical role in the fields of image and video processing and there are many practical applications, such as quality monitoring to maintain Quality of Service (QoS) requirements, the evaluation of video processing for compression, and perceptually optimal design of video processing systems. Ms. Lina Jin’s dissertation investigates and analyses image artifacts resulting from various 2D and 3D image/video applications and explores human visual perception of different image artifacts through subjective experiments. She conducted in designing and building a large new image quality database, TID2013. TID2013 provides [...]