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Seven MCL Members Attending PhD Hooding Ceremony

Seven MCL members attended the Viterbi PhD hooding ceremony on Thursday, May 15, 2014, from 8:30-11:00 a.m. in the Bovard Auditorium. They were Martin Gawecki, Harshad Kadu, Hyunsuk Ko, Kuan-Hsien Liu, Tsung-Jung Liu, Sanjay Purushotham and Xue Wang. Congratulations to them and their families for their accomplishments in completing their PhD program at USC.

Martin Gawecki received a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Riverside (UCR) and an M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California (USC). Since 2009, he has been a member in the Media Communications Lab at USC, participating in the fields of statistical signal processing, machine learning, and time series analysis. His dissertation, entitled “A Signal Processing Approach to Robust Jet Engine Fault Detection and Diagnosis,” discusses the algorithms that can be used to advance engine health monitoring (EHM) with respect to data from vibration, acoustic, and classical (gas path) sensors. Done in conjunction with the Pratt-Whitney Institute for Collaborative Engineering (PWICE), his work demonstrates the superiority of vibration over acoustic sensors and showcases the ability of machine learning methods to assess performance of real engines based on fully simulated training data.

Harshad Kadu received his Bachelor’s degree from National Institute of Technology, Nagpur in 2008 and Master’s degree from University of Southern California, Los Angeles in 2011. Since then he has been pursuing his PhD in Electrical Engineering with Media Communications Lab at USC. His research interests include 3D human motion capture data analysis, image and music information processing, computer vision and statistical machine learning. His thesis titled ‘Advanced Techniques for Mocap Data Classification and Text Detection’ presents multi-resolution string representation based temporal and spatial domain techniques for human action recognition. His recent work [...]

By |May 18th, 2014|News|Comments Off on Seven MCL Members Attending PhD Hooding Ceremony|

MCLab Initiates Code Sharing Project

As algorithms become more and more complex, the implementations become more and more difficult. Without firsthand knowledge on the algorithm, it is extremely difficult and time consuming to build programs with respect to the publications. Many researchers are actively releasing their source code to the computer vision community these days. Their kindness gives great momentum to the development of better algorithms and the analysis on the existing approaches.

MCL wants to be a part of the selfless community by releasing all our research programs to the public. We are initiating the MCL Codebase Project, which aims at sharing our group member’s first hand implementations to the world. Since we are currently working on various researches, we will index them into five categories, including image/video quality assessment, face detection and recognition, scene recognition, object detection, image retrieval.

We will be offering projects through Github, so source codes are constantly updated and maintained. Anyone can easily branch either a stable version or a cutting edge development. The source code will be released under GNU General Public License, so researchers can use them freely. Researchers are welcome to contribute to our codebase. Send us a pull request and help us build a more powerful code base.

Our group member Hao Xu, Xiaqing Pan, and Chen Chen will serve as the MCL Codebase Project committee. Our senior group member Joe Lin, Sudeng Hu, and our group alumni Jiangyang Zhang will join the board of advisory. Professor Kuo will closely monitor the progress of this project.

By |May 11th, 2014|News|Comments Off on MCLab Initiates Code Sharing Project|
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    MCLab Inspires Cooperative Biomedical Research between USC and UCLA

MCLab Inspires Cooperative Biomedical Research between USC and UCLA

The Media Communication Lab (MCLab) at USC has a strong commitment to providing an interdisciplinary environment for student researchers, to nourish diversity of application of electrical engineering. Ph.D. candidate Xue Wang, whose research interest lies in biomedical and information processing, has been working on the validation of an evaluation tool for assessing surgical techniques. Capsulorhexis, which is a significant portion of cataract surgery, is of particular interest. Ongoing work on this problem has collaboration between faculty in the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering at USC and the Jules Stein Eye Institute (JSEI) at UCLA since June of 2013.

The research aims at developing a valid set of quantitative and qualitative measures of surgical skills to accelerate the training of residents. Currently, capsulorhexis surgical techniques are assessed through an expert-panel-video-review using evaluation questions from the OSCAR and GRASIS evaluation tools.* However, there is considerable inter-observer variability, and direct quantitative questions were the least reliable. Xue’s work combines knowledge in biomedical image/video processing, machine learning, and computer vision to develop an automated quality assessment system to evaluate and improve surgical techniques, such that it is objective, accurate, and reliable. Human inspection is minimized along with the exploration of surgical video understanding via machine learning.

“It’s exciting to put focused and concerted effort in exploring the unknown and trying to find a solution for challenging problems. When you are working with excellent and talented people, you have a more open outlook on the potential of new cross-disciplinary methods”, Xue said. Xue’s work has been presented at AUPO and ASCRS conferences in January of 2014 and April of 2014, respectively.** Her result shows that video/image analysis provides an objective way to measure proficiency in the capsulorhexis part of cataract [...]

By |May 4th, 2014|News|Comments Off on MCLab Inspires Cooperative Biomedical Research between USC and UCLA|
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    Professor Kuo Received Two Distinguished Teaching/Mentorship Awards

Professor Kuo Received Two Distinguished Teaching/Mentorship Awards

The MCL Director, Professor Kuo, received two distinguished awards for his contributions in graduate students teaching and mentorship this week – the 2014 Northrop Grumman Excellence in Teaching Award and a 2014 Mellon Faculty Mentoring Graduate Students Award.

The Northrop Grumman Award was announced during the Viterbi School of Engineering annual award luncheon at the USC Town and Gown on April 22, 12-2pm. The Mellon Award ceremony was held, in the Vineyard Room at the USC Davidson Conference Center on April 24, 4:30-6pm.

Prof. Kuo said, “In my 25-year academic career at USC, nothing has been more rewarding than serving as a mentor for a large variety of talented and hard-working graduate students.” He further added, “What mentorship attempts to accomplish is not only to nurture a maturing researcher, but also to mold a decent and respectable person in our society. In this sense, a mentor is like a pot maker. We have a responsibility to shape the values and perspectives of our students. A mentor is fundamentally a role model for mentees. Although what we say is important, both who we are and what we do are much more important.”

In his personal letter to Prof. Kuo, Dean Yannis C. Yortsos of the Viterbi School of Engineering wrote, “This honor is a great testament to your role in creating a culture of mentoring in USC Viterbi and demonstrating the commitment to nurture the new generation of scholars. On behalf of the entire Viterbi family, I wanted you to know how proud we are of your many accomplishments.”

Congratulations to Prof. Kuo for his distinguished achievements and received honorable recognition by both the Mellon Foundation and the Northrop Grumman Corporation.

By |April 27th, 2014|News|Comments Off on Professor Kuo Received Two Distinguished Teaching/Mentorship Awards|
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    Media Communications Lab Begins Research Projects with Google Glass

Media Communications Lab Begins Research Projects with Google Glass

Google Glass provides a great foundation for developing various Computer Vision algorithms and applications. Our group is now actively working on a number of different problems and has several pending algorithms to be implemented on this exciting platform.

One objective is to perform landmark recognition, object recognition, and facial recognition. These applications can help people in numerous aspects of their lives, ranging from tourist navigation to hardware training. With object detection and augmented reality, we can provide tools to train junior engineers with visual instruction instead of verbal guidance. We believe this could effectively improve the quality of training while reducing its cost.

Google Glass is also a promising venue in the application of information retrieval. In an ideal scenario, Glass would be able to pull up information on whatever the viewer sees. Traveling to a new place would mean automatically recognizing it and displaying pertinent local information, such as nearby restaurants or places of interest. Catching a glimpse of a movie poster would allow instant identification of the movie and an option to play the trailer. There are no limits in application, but important challenges exist throughout the process of recognition, retrieval, curation, and display of such content.

One final computer vision application our group is particularly interested in is visual saliency detection, which tries to detect where humans look in an image or video. Automated visual saliency detectors attempt to extract the regions that humans are interested in and are a fundamental process for many other computer vision applications, such as object detection and image retrieval. While Glass has no tracking of the human eye, it does provide an insight into this problem by capturing the motion of a person’s gaze as it turns to [...]

By |April 20th, 2014|News|Comments Off on Media Communications Lab Begins Research Projects with Google Glass|
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    12th Pratt & Whitney Institute for Collaborative Engineering Board Meeting

  • PWICE board meeting visit mirabel

12th Pratt & Whitney Institute for Collaborative Engineering Board Meeting

On Wednesday, April 3rd, 2014 the board of directors for the Pratt-Whitney Institute for Collaborative Engineering (PWICE) met for an annual discussion of current and future projects between UTC Pratt-Whitney, Korean Airlines, USC, and Inha University. Viterbi School of Engineering Dean Yannis Yortsos represented USC at the meeting along with Director of Corporate and Foundations Relations Hossein Pourmand. Also in attendance were Media Communications Lab’s Dr. Jay Kuo and Ph.D. student Martin Gawecki, who presented their ongoing work on transient engine gas-path diagnostic systems.

Gas Path Analysis (GPA) is a well-founded and understood aspect of engine health management within the gas turbine jet engine industry. However, state of the art methods are limited by the technology constraints and a focus on steady-state phases of flight, like cruise. Newer engines’ higher sensing capabilities, fleet-wide health data integration, and a need for full-flight analytics will require modern algorithms to approach this problem from a Big Data perspective. Current work on this problem includes developing such comprehensive approaches with the use of machine learning and developing appropriate calibration metrics between real-world and simulated data.

PWICE is an ongoing venture joining industry and academia in the United States and Korea in an effort to promote unparalleled collaboration at the university level along with practical R&D for the aerospace industry. The Media Communications Lab has been a part of PWICE for the last 6 years, having worked on 3 separate projects within the institute.

Link to PWICE: http://viterbi.usc.edu/academics/globalization/international-research-center/pwice.htm

By |April 12th, 2014|News|Comments Off on 12th Pratt & Whitney Institute for Collaborative Engineering Board Meeting|
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    MCL and AdShare Developed Fast Audio Matching Technology

MCL and AdShare Developed Fast Audio Matching Technology

The USC Media Communications Laboratory, led by Professor C.-C. Jay Kuo and two PhD students – Harshad Kadu and Jian Li, and the AdShare engineering team have co-developed a new technology, called fast audio matching (FAM), to detect clean and/or degraded audio that has the master sound recording mixed with dialogue and sound effects such as in a movie, TV show or commercial.

This technology extracts inherent audio fingerprints from an audio clip that are robust to manipulations/degradations. The FAM system can detect songs of partial durations, say, less than 15 seconds and provide a confidence level on a scale from 1 to N, where N being a perfect match. It can be run on a personal computer running Linux, MySQL, Apache, and PHP now, and will be implemented in mobile devices with a cloud environment in the near future.

The joint R&D team has continuously worked on system performance optimization to meet real-time processing requirements. The team also keeps developing a more advanced technique that handles sounds distorted by other methods such as pitch shifts, white noise, and instrument swaps.

By |April 6th, 2014|News|Comments Off on MCL and AdShare Developed Fast Audio Matching Technology|

Congratulations to Jiangyang Zhang for passing His Defense

Congratulations to Jiangyang Zhang for passing his defense on March 24th. Jiangyang’s PhD thesis title is “Advanced Visual Processing Techniques for Latent Fingerprint Detection and Video Retargeting,” and his thesis committee includes: Jay Kuo (Chair), Sandy Sawchuk and Aichiro Nakano (Outside Member). All committee members were greatly impressed by Jiangyang’s excellent presentation, beautiful slides, and well-organized contents. The two main chapters of his thesis have already been published in IEEE Trans. on Information Forensics and Security and IEEE Trans. on Image Processing. The last chapter will be submitted to a top-ranked conference.

After his graduation, Jiangyang will close up his startup, start looking for jobs and hopefully soon move to San Francisco, a place where he truly feels belong to. In summer 2014, together with some friends he will spend about 2 months biking across America, 3800 miles, from San Francisco to Washington DC. He is doing this not only for achieving his own dream, but also for supporting “Free lunch for Children”, a charity campaign in China (www.mianfeiwucan.org). For more details about his motivation and action plans, please visit: www.danxingdao.org

By |March 29th, 2014|News|Comments Off on Congratulations to Jiangyang Zhang for passing His Defense|
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    Ultra-High Definition (UHD) Video Acquisition, Process and Display System Installed at MCL

Ultra-High Definition (UHD) Video Acquisition, Process and Display System Installed at MCL

Moving from HD to Ultra HD (UHD) has become a trend in the display industry as UHDTV systems can provide better user experience such as stronger sensations of reality and superior picture quality. In SMPTE 2013 symposium, it is forecasted that the shipments of UHDTV sets are expected to reach four million units by 2017.

Act as one of the leading groups in video processing research, MCL lab is currently one of the pioneers in exploring UHD video processing technology. The lab has setup a UHD display with high performance playback system. The purpose of the system is to provide the playback of 4K UHD (i.e., 3840×2160 resolution) raw video data in real-time: 60 frame/sec at minimum and up to 120 frames/sec. Besides, to address the concern that a lack of native UHD contents will limit the research, a professional UHD acquisition system will also be available in the lab soon. We expect that this UHD system can help us create more research topics and produce more UHD contents for the researchers who are interested in the technology of video processing.

The UHD system in MCL lab:

Acquisition: Sony 4K professional handheld camcorder
Display: 65” Samsung 4K Ultra HD Smart TV
Playback: High performance Dell Precision workstation supporting 4K raw video playback up to 120 FPS

By |March 23rd, 2014|News|Comments Off on Ultra-High Definition (UHD) Video Acquisition, Process and Display System Installed at MCL|
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    Prof. Kuo Being Appointed as Dean’s Professor in Electrical Engineering Systems

Prof. Kuo Being Appointed as Dean’s Professor in Electrical Engineering Systems

The MCL Director, Prof. Jay Kuo, has recently been appointed as the Dean’s Professor in Electrical Engineering Systems in recognition of his outstanding academic achievements.

Prof. Kuo said, “This is a great honor by considering that there are so many outstanding faculty members in our Department. I appreciate very much the recognition by Dean Yortsos and the Dean’s Professor Selection Committee for what I have achieved in the last 25 years at USC. Actually, this honor should be shared by all alumni and current students in the Media Communications Lab since I would not be able to do much alone without the dedicated efforts of the whole team. It is my privilege to be able to work with so many talented PhD students.”

Besides scholarly publication, Prof. Kuo is most well-known for his two major contributions. First, Prof. Kuo has guided 120 students to their PhD degrees, which places him as the top advisor in the Mathematics Genealogy Project. Second, Prof. Kuo is tightly connected to the IT industry and has received about 150 funded research projects from 60+ industrial companies. His well-trained PhD students are extremely popular in the high tech industry.

Congratulation to Prof. Jay Kuo for this well-deserved honor!

By |March 15th, 2014|News|Comments Off on Prof. Kuo Being Appointed as Dean’s Professor in Electrical Engineering Systems|