Monthly Archives: February 2017

MCL Works on User’s Experience on Head-Mounted VR Devices

Virtual Reality, or more precisely, the head-mounted-display (HMD) is becoming increasingly popular in recent years. With the release of consumer level products such as Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, it is no longer difficult for users to have a visit to the virtual world. Their fabulous immersive experience can always amaze the users when first played. However, adverse effects such as Motion Sickness are sometimes reported during the play. It is important to have a better understanding on these side effects.

Our research focuses on the qualitative and further quantitative measurement of the Motion Sickness in Virtual Reality. With the help of a better understanding on the reliable measurement on the Motion Sickness, we can not only control and even avoid this effect accordingly, but also develop a set of research paradigm to measure similar subjective feelings.

Currently, we have tried to proposed a physically sound, as well as practically feasible model, to explain and quantify the Motion Sickness in Virtual Reality. Our initial small-scale experiments have shown supportive evidence to our model. Though, will this model actually work on further experiments? Who knows. Maybe only the nature can tell. However, aren’t those endeavors to know more about the complex nature what research is about?

By |February 27th, 2017|News|Comments Off on MCL Works on User’s Experience on Head-Mounted VR Devices|
Read More

MCL Works on Road Detection for Autonomous Driving

Advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) have attracted more and more attention nowadays, where various IT technologies are introduced to vehicles to enhance driving safety and automation.

MCL members, Junting Zhang and Yuhang Song, together with MediaTek Inc. have started a collaborative research project on ADAS-oriented deep learning technologies since January 2016. Single-image-based traffic scene segmentation and road detection have been studied extensively throughout 2016. We adapted the state-of-the-art general-purpose CNN architectures to urban scene semantic segmentation task, overcoming the cross-domain issue. On the other hand, computational and memory efficiency have always been our major concerns, we were also devoted to simplify the network structure and reduce redundant computation.

In 2017, we will explore the deep learning technologies for video processing. Although there are many interesting results in semantic urban scene understanding based on the CNN technology, semantic video understanding is still a challenging problem. We will try to find a semantic video understanding method that outperforms the single-image-based algorithms. To address this type of problems, we will exploit the temporal information.

By |February 19th, 2017|News|Comments Off on MCL Works on Road Detection for Autonomous Driving|
Read More

MCL Works on Drone Detection for Airport Safety

Nowadays, there is the growing popularity of commercial and recreation use of the drones which are the new threat to the airline safety. In Fall 2016, USC MCL, Inha University, Korean Air and Pratt & Whitney Institute for Collaborative Engineering (PWICE) started a joint research project to build a drone monitoring system to improve the airport security. USC MCL is held responsible for providing autonomous imaging-based drone monitoring system. One of MCL members, Yueru Chen, is working on this project.

On Thursday, February 9th, 2017, an midterm discussion of current projects was held between UTC Pratt-Whitney, Korean Airlines, USC, and Inha University. For the drone monitoring project, in attendance were Media Communications Lab’s Dr. Jay Kuo, Dr. Jongmoo Choi, Master’s student Pranav Aggarwal and Ph.D. student Yueru Chen, who presented their ongoing work on imaging-based drone monitoring system. USC MCL has developed comprehensive approaches including two modules, detection and tracking, with the use the deep learning methods. The proposed system was designed to detect illegal drones’ position and track their movement. During the meeting, USC MCL showed the promising results and discussed the future plan.

By |February 12th, 2017|News|Comments Off on MCL Works on Drone Detection for Airport Safety|
Read More
  • Permalink Gallery

    Congratulations to MCL Alumni for Joining Facebook, Google, Apple, and Bloomberg

Congratulations to MCL Alumni for Joining Facebook, Google, Apple, and Bloomberg

We would like to say congratulations to five of MCL Alumni–Chen Chen, Shangwen Li, Hao Xu, Jian Li, and Xiaqing Pan–for passing their PhD defenses and starting their career lives in such great companies of the U.S.. This year, we will have Chen and Shangwen joining Facebook, Hao joining Google, Jian joining Apple, and Xiaqing joining Bloomberg. We are so glad to have them to share their experience and advises for us.

Chen Chen:
I joined MCL 6 years ago as a master student. In the first seminar talk, Prof. Kuo’s sharing totally changed my view of being a researcher. It is the moment that I made the hard decision to become a PhD student. As expected, joining MCL creates unexpected benefits to my life. The precious platform provides many opportunities for me to learn and to grow. It allows me to meet many excellent students and scholars. Working with them is like visualizing myself in a mirror, which teaches me to know myself before growing. MCL also creates huge challenges to push me to the extreme. Every exam, project due and paper submission are companied with thousands of hours of rigorous and humble team work. “Aim high and act low” is the most impressive lesson I learned from the hard process.
It is the precious experience in MCL that offers the Facebook position at the end of my PhD. However, different from what I learned in MCL, I expect to gain more working experience and entrepreneurship in Facebook. I would also like to see more students from our lab can join Facebook to strengthen the MCL alumina team in the future.

Shangwen Li:
During my past internship at Facebook, I worked on a [...]

By |February 5th, 2017|News|Comments Off on Congratulations to MCL Alumni for Joining Facebook, Google, Apple, and Bloomberg|
Read More