chuntinghuang

  • Permalink Gallery

    Three High School Students Accomplished Summer Internship in MCL

Three High School Students Accomplished Summer Internship in MCL

In Friday morning, three high school internship students gave their final presentations about Kinect project and the website they built during the web design mini course. Through the successful and impressive presentation, it also showed the fact that these students surely put a lot of efforts into their works.

One of their mentor, Weihao Gan said, “It was a great pleasure to work with Kaiwen and Harry on the Kinect project which was developed on C/C++ platform. Actually, besides the technique part, the more important thing they need to learn is how to generate an engineering product. During this process, they firstly thought about the idea and wrote the proposal, then followed the schedule to finish the work. They were all very hard-working and creative. We talked and discussed every week about the project, and I also learned a lot from this supervision experience. Again, I want to thank Kaiwen and Harry for working together and sharing an amazing summer time.”

In addition, after the presentation, their parents also brought homemade Chinese food and joined the group seminar to show their support. Group members all appreciated them very much. During the seminar, the summer interns also expressed their thanks to the whole team including Weihao Gan and Xin Zhang, who supervised them on the project; Brian Lan and Becky Qiu, who taught them in the web design mini course. They also appreciated Prof. Kuo for giving them this precious chance to come here and teaching them in Entrepreneurship mini course.

Congratulations on their achievement and well-done work!

By |August 3rd, 2014|News|Comments Off on Three High School Students Accomplished Summer Internship in MCL|

An Interview with Students in Entrepreneurship Course

The short summer course on “Entrepreneurship” offered by Professor Kuo is coming to an end. In order to acquire some feedbacks, we had some random interviews with students who took the course this afternoon .

Xue Wang, a recently graduated PhD student from MCL, still hold an enormouse passion and persistency in attending this course. On her intuitive in taking this course, she said,  “This class lets me learn new things, and think in a different way. As a graduate student researcher, I might have been familiar with and accustomed to a fixed pattern or mode of studying and thinking, which may limit my horizon and lead to incomprehensive understanding of the world.” And the course surely benefits her a lot in enlightening the entrepreneurship in a whole different way: “This short course guides me to look into a different domain and opens my mind. It attracts me by exploring the story beneath that surface, for example, the story behind a successful product. Through the class, I also learn how an outstanding company builds the vision of the future on base of innovation, cooperation, and management, in order to keep it sticking out from the crowd of competitors. It is, viewed from other perspective, a part of the ‘story’ unknown to most clients, but of great value worth studying as being ‘stay hungry, stay foolish’. “She said.

Along with the common MCL members in group, there is another “special” student , Chuqiao Xu, a summer internship student from Tsinghua University.

And the following are some short Q&A with her during the interview:

Why did you want to take this course?
“Because I want to know more about entrepreneurship and industry, I think the knowledge is really necessary.”

What’s the [...]

By |July 27th, 2014|News|Comments Off on An Interview with Students in Entrepreneurship Course|

Interview with Visiting Scholar Lina Jin

Lina Jin, a researcher of Department of Signal Processing, Tampere University of Technology, Finland, have been visiting Media Communication Lab since October 2013. She kindly took some time to share her research experience with us.

Could you talk about your research interest?

My research interests mainly focus on image and video quality metrics, human vision modeling, stereoscopic video quality metrics, perceptual image coding, image enhancement and super resolution.  Modern image and video system typically consist of several processing stages, such as acquisition, compression, storage, transmission, enhancement, and reproduction. In ach stage, noised might be introduced, resulting in a degradation of visual quality. Therefore, quality assessment plays an important role in the design or optimization for an image processing system. The objective quality assessment aims at automatically estimating input image or video quality and highly correlating to subjective judgment .To design an effective and efficient quality assessment algorithm, we need deeply understand how human visual system (HVS) perceives image quality and how these properties could be simulated. The research I am currently working on in MCL is related to quality assessment based image enhancement and super resolution for UHDTV.

Please share your thoughts about our lab.

It’s a great honor for me towork at MCL group with Prof. Kuo and group members. MCL is one of world famous labs in the field of multimedia.  Now, MCL group is conducting academic research on cutting-age topics, such as computer vision, machine learning, and image processing.

Every Friday, MCL group holds an academic seminar. During the seminar, Prof. Kuo shares his research experiences to thegroup members, and one of his studentsgives an one-hour high-quality presentation to share and discuss his or her recent research work with others. I am very enjoyed the seminar [...]

By |July 15th, 2014|News|Comments Off on Interview with Visiting Scholar Lina Jin|

MCLab Hosts Visiting Student from Tsinghua University

MCLab has a new summer intern student, Chuqiao (Joyce) Xu, from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.

Chuqiao is currently a third-year undergraduate student. She has come to the lab since July 1st, and Professor Kuo met with her and discussed about her research plan on last Tuesday. She will start to work on topics related to Face Recognition in the Wild and Google Glass. In addition, she has shown great interests in the short summer course on “Entrepreneurship” taught by Professor Kuo.

Let’s welcome Chuqiao to MCLab, and wish her a great summer intern experience with us.

By |July 6th, 2014|News|Comments Off on MCLab Hosts Visiting Student from Tsinghua University|

MCLab Hosts three High School Students

MCLab provides summer intern position to three 11th grade high school students, Allison, Harry, and Kaiwen. During this summer, they are taking two courses and working on one project, which are listed as following:
Web Analysis and Design (taught by Brian Lan and Becky Qiu) – Hosts on  Tuesday between 2 and 4 pm and Friday from 10 am to 12 pm
Entrepreneurship (taught by Prof Kuo) – Hosts on Thursday from 2 to 4 pm
Project (supervised by Xin Zhang and Weihao Gan) – Get acquainted with Microsoft Kinect system and learn to develop applications based on it

We also have the chance to interview with those three students about their backgrounds and interests.

Allison: I am an incoming senior at Arcadia High School. I am part of my school’s varsity percussion team. It’s really awesome. If you’re interested, I’d be excited to share some videos and tell you what it is we do. I am also currently working as a waitress at Stonefire Grill. I have two cats. My two cats, best friends, and family are the people I hold closest in my heart(: As for academic interests, I’m dabbling in different things in hopes of discovering something I am passionate about.

Harry: I am currently a rising senior at the Harker School in San Jose. I like to study Mathematics and Sciences in the classroom and enjoy swimming and playing water polo in my free time. As an avid student, I plan on continuing to study Computer Science or engineering in college. Outside of school, I also enjoy surfing the web and watching tv shows.

Kaiwen: I’m an incoming senior at Arcadia High School. I’m part of my school’s Math Team and Physics Team  and am president of a club [...]

By |June 29th, 2014|News|Comments Off on MCLab Hosts three High School Students|
  • Permalink Gallery

    MCLab Director, Professor Kuo, Offers A Short Summer Course on “Entrepreneurship” to Its Members

MCLab Director, Professor Kuo, Offers A Short Summer Course on “Entrepreneurship” to Its Members

MCLab Director, Professor Jay Kuo, is giving a series of lectures on “entrepreneurship” to its members during the summer time. The content includes the following:

Lecture #1: What is an entrepreneur?

Lecture #2: What do you expect in a “start-up” process?

Lecture #3: Look for “start-up” ideas and be prepared to move

Lecture #4: Innovation and execution

Lecture #5: Build up a strong team

Lecture #6: Marketing and sale

Lecture #7: Local support and globalization

Professor Kuo said that “It is important to equip engineering students with some knowledge in entrepreneurship since they may have a new perspective on their future career path. It is fortunate for me to know many friends who are industrial leaders with strong entrepreneurship spirit. They let me understand the value of technology from the business viewpoint. It is fresh and inspiring. Furthermore, it helps me shape my research agenda. I hope that this series of lectures can be motivating our lab members to look at things from a more diversified angle.”

The first lecture was given in the afternoon of June 19th. It was very well attended.

By |June 22nd, 2014|News|Comments Off on MCLab Director, Professor Kuo, Offers A Short Summer Course on “Entrepreneurship” to Its Members|
  • Permalink Gallery

    Congratulations to 4 MCLab Members for Passing their Defenses

Congratulations to 4 MCLab Members for Passing their Defenses

Congratulations to four members of MCLab, Martin Gawecki, Tsung-Jung Liu, Kuan-Hsien Liu, and Xue Wang for passing their Defenses in the last week.

Martin Gawecki’s dissertation title is “SIGNAL PROCESSING APPROACH TO ROBUST JET ENGINE FAULTDETECTION AND DIAGNOSIS”. His Dissertation Committee includes: Jay Kuo (Chair), Keith Jenkins and Aiichiro Nakano (Outside Member).The Committee was very pleased with his work in applying signal processing techniques to the solution of real-world problems. It demands a good understanding of the whole problem and the access to some valuable data. This bridging effort has been highly appreciated.

Tsung-Jung Liu’s thesis title is “A LEARNING-BASED APPROACH TO IMAGE QUALITY ASSESSMENT”. His dissertation committee members include: Jay Kuo (Chair), Panayiotis Georgiou and Aiichiro Nakano (Outside Member). They were amazed by the quality of his work and an impressive publication list as a result of his research.

Kuan-Hsien Liu’s thesis title is “FACIAL AGE GROUPING AND ESTIMATION VIA ENSEMBLE LEARNING”. His dissertation committee members include: Jay Kuo (Chair), Panayiotis Georgiou, Suya Yu, and Aiichiro Nakano (Outside Member). The Committee was impressed with the novelty of his proposed face-image-based age estimation methods as well as their excellent performance as compared with other state-of-the-art algorithms. The Committee also encouraged him to submit the high quality work to top-ranked journal/conference.

Xue Wang’s dissertation title is “Machine Learning Based Techniques for Biomedical Image/Video Analysis”. Her dissertation committee includes: Jay Kuo (Chair), Sandy Sawchuk (Co-Chair) and Jesse Yan (Outside Member). The Committee was very satisfied with the excellent presentation and results delivered by Xue.

We all wish them the best for their next step.

By |June 15th, 2014|News|Comments Off on Congratulations to 4 MCLab Members for Passing their Defenses|
  • Permalink Gallery

    Enabling “Internet of Things” – A New Research Focus of MCLab

Enabling “Internet of Things” – A New Research Focus of MCLab

Professor C.-C. Jay Kuo announced a new research focus of MCLab on “Internet of Things (IOT)”. Professor Kuo said that the concept of IOT and some of its implementations had existed for years yet sparsely in isolated areas such as Fedex/UPS mailing systems, smart green building, smart home, etc. The connection between IOT and cloud/distributed computing platform and the emergence of wearable devices make an extensive IOT deployment a reality. Enabling technologies for IOT systems include: sensing (data acquisition), networking (data exchange/aggregation), computing (data analytics), storage (data preservation), control (decision making) and security/privacy of data and systems.

By leveraging on its core competence, MCLab will have emphasis on visual sensors acquired by video and depth cameras and conduct video analytics to recognize people, scene and environment and to understand human emotions, activities, behaviors. These techniques can be applied to effective learning, video surveillance, assistance to blind, automated driving, etc.

*Images are from:

Cisco & Beecham Research, http://blog.atlasrfidstore.com/internet-of-things-and-rfid

China Internet Network Information Center, http://www1.cnnic.cn/ScientificResearch/LeadingEdge/wlw1/

 

By |June 8th, 2014|News|Comments Off on Enabling “Internet of Things” – A New Research Focus of MCLab|

MCLab Releases the New Video Database: MCL-V

The high-definition video broadcasting and streaming services are blooming nowadays.  Consumers can enjoy on-demand video services from Netflix, Hulu or Amazon, and watching high-definition (HD) programs becomes the mainstream for video content consumption. According to the latest report, more than half of US population watches on-line movies or dramas. Specifically, the viewers have increased from 37% in 2010 to 51% in 2013. The watched video programs vary in bit rates and resolutions due to the available bandwidth of their networks. Different sizes of video are transmitted at lower bit rates and up-scaled for display on HDTV (e.g., playing a 720p movie on the 1080p screen). This is common in people’s daily life, yet video quality assessment on HD streaming video has not yet been extensively studied in the past.

To fulfill the need, MCLab has released a new video image database recently, which is called MCL-V. This database captures two typical video distortion types in video services. It contains 12 source video clips and 96 distorted video clips with subjective assessment scores.  The source video clips are selected from a large pool of public-domain HD video sequences with representative and diversified contents. Both distortion types are perceptually adjusted to yield distinguishable distortion levels. An improved pairwise comparison method is adopted for subjective evaluation. Furthermore, several existing image and video quality assessment algorithms are evaluated against MCL-V database.  MCL-V is publicly accessible to facilitate future video quality research of the community.

Download link: http://mcl.usc.edu/mcl-v-database/

By |June 1st, 2014|News|Comments Off on MCLab Releases the New Video Database: MCL-V|

MCLab Releases the New 3D Database: MCL-3D

Stereoscopic image/video contents have become popular nowadays. Since the multi-view image format is costly for visual communication, the 2D-image-plus-depth format is proposed as an alternative, where a texture image and its associated depth image are recorded at a view point simultaneously. For stereoscopic display, the depth image-based rendering (DIBR) technique is applied to the texture and depth images to generate the proper left and right views.

One critical issue regarding 3D-related applications is to develop a robust metric to assess the quality of 3D image (or video) stimuli. Although a good stereoscopic image quality assessment is much in need due to the emergence of 3D visual contents, most of stereoscopic image databases are still small and based on traditional stereo image format, that is, captured left and right images. This restricts the design of good objective quality metrics.

To tackle these limitations and facilitate the related research, MCLab has released a new 3D image database recently, which is called MCL-3D. This database is valuable for the following reasons. Firstly, the MCL-3D database adopts the 2D-image-plus-depth source, where stereoscopic images are synthesized by the DIBR rendering technique. Secondly, all stereo images in the MCL-3D database are of high resolution, which is closer to today’s real world applications. Finally, the database is downloadable online with the detailed description of the database generation and the corresponding subjective test. We hope that our MCL-3D database can help other researchers in developing a good quality assessment metric.

Download link: http://mcl.usc.edu/mcl-3d-database/

By |May 25th, 2014|News|Comments Off on MCLab Releases the New 3D Database: MCL-3D|