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MCL Members Had a Trip to Huntington Library

On August 17, 2016, MCL held a group excursion to the Huntington Library, Art Collection and Botanical Gardens.

The Huntington Library, Art Collection and Botanical Gardens is a research and educational institute established in 1919 by Henry E. and Arabella Huntington. Its library is one of the largest and most complete research libraries in the United States in British and American history and literature. Covering 129 arces, the Botanical Gardens have more than a dozen specialized gardens, among which the most remarkable are the Japanese Garden, the Chinese Garden, the Rose Garden.

The visit started with a guided-tour through the Rose Garden, the Japanese Garden, the Chinese Garden and the Conservatory. During the guided-tour, MCL members not only enjoyed the wonderful views in the gardens, but also learned the history of the Huntington and appreciated different unique cultures. The tour continued with a nice walk in other specialized gardens such as the Desert Garden, the Lily Ponds, the Subtropical Garden. The visit ended with the library exhibits in a wide range from literature to science.

By |August 29th, 2016|News|Comments Off on MCL Members Had a Trip to Huntington Library|

Interview with MCL Summer Intern Student Eric Hsieh

In summer 2016, MCL welcomes a new intern student, Eric Hsieh. We gave him a warm welcome and had a short interview with him.

1.Could you briefly introduce yourself? (Previous research experience, project experience, research interest and expertise)

Hello everyone, I am Eric (HsiangChih, Hsieh). I am a graduate student studying computer science in USC. I worked on a project of 3D pet fish, which is a Motion Sensing Game using Kinect to capture the hand gesture. I am interested in computer graphics. Hope I can come up with something awesome in the future.

2. What’s your first impression of USC and MCL?

To me, USC is a nice place where I cannot wait to explore it and MCL is a place “where amazing happens.” Since the summer intern project began, I’d learned so many precious experience and met so many awesome classmates. Members in the MCL are willing to help each other and the atmosphere here is really nice.

3. What’s your future expectation for MCL?

I think prof. Kuo had already set a really good core value for the MCL lab. With prof. Kuo’s leading and every members’ effort. I believe that MCL will have a bright future as long as everyone in the lab keeping their faith and working as a high efficiency team. Fight on!

By |August 14th, 2016|News|Comments Off on Interview with MCL Summer Intern Student Eric Hsieh|

Interview with MCL Summer Intern Student Di Fu

In summer 2016, MCL welcomes a new intern student, Di Fu. We gave him a warm welcome and had a short interview with him.

1. Could you briefly introduce yourself? (Previous research experience, project experience, research interest and expertise)

I am Di Fu from Department of Physics, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. My major is physic and I also minor in computer science. I am a junior student and will go through my fourth year in the university soon. I have research experience in 3-D reconstruction and my research interest is computer vision and computational photography. For my hobby, I like playing basketball. I was the captain of the basketball team of our department and won second prize in university’s basketball championship. I am also interested in detective novels with multiple tricks inside it.

 

2. What’s your first impression of USC and MCL?

USC is a really great university. I am fortunate to be here, to walk through the beautiful campus, to breathe the fresh air and to chat with smart persons. MCL is even better. Professor Kuo is really kind and everyone works hard here. I enjoy staying here and I learn a lot from my mentors and other students here.

 

3. What’s your future expectation for MCL?

First, I appreciate that Professor Kuo provides me with this chance to study in MCL this summer. Thanks to him, I meet many people here and I feel happy to spend this memorable summer with them. For the future, I believe MCL is getting better under the guidance of Professor Kuo. I hope to have the chance to come back.

By |July 31st, 2016|News|Comments Off on Interview with MCL Summer Intern Student Di Fu|

Interview with MCL Summer Intern Student Weiqi Fang

In summer 2016, MCL welcomes a new intern student, Weiqi Fang. We gave him a warm welcome and had a short interview with him.

1. Could you briefly introduce yourself? (Previous research experience, project experience, research interest and expertise)

I come from Shenzhen, China and major in Electronic Engineering in Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. I am now in my Junior year, and gonna be a Senior Student next semester. I have interned in Nanyang Technological University, Singapore the last summer, doing works on speech signal analysis. My research interest is image processing, including image detection, image classification and so on. I am very interested in image detection, especially face detection.
I have a variety of hobbies, including tennis, basketball, watching movies, hobby collection and so on.
2. What’s your first impression of USC and MCL?

I think that MCL is a very warm and positive group. Students here are all very kind and helpful. Everybody works hard. I feel honored and am very glad to be here as a part of MCL.

 

3. What’s your future expectation for MCL?

I wish to learn more about CNN and wish to be able to work out some project by the time I am leaving here. I am looking forward to make friends with you all and make progress in image processing field.

By |July 24th, 2016|News|Comments Off on Interview with MCL Summer Intern Student Weiqi Fang|

MCL Member Attended CVPR 2016 in Las Vegas

Yuzhuo Ren attended CVPR 2016, hosted in Las Vegas from June 26th to July 1st, to present her work in the Large-scale Scene Understanding Challenge (LSUN) workshop. The website of the LSUN challenge is provided here: http://lsun.cs.princeton.edu/2016/.

There are three challenges or tasks in the LSUN workshop: scene classification, saliency predication and room layout estimation. The workshop provides datasets that are much larger than existing ones for benchmarking algorithms proposed by different teams. The team with the best performance is named the winner and is invited to give a talk during the workshop.

Yuzhuo presented her work during the LSUN workshop. The title of her work is “A Coarse-to-Fine Indoor Layout Estimation (CFILE) Method.” This method provides a two-stage indoor layout estimation system, coarse layout estimation followed by layout refinement. The talk was very well received.

The two keynote speakers, Jitendra Malik and Yann LeCun, gave very insightful talks. Jitendra Malik discussed semantic segmentation using RGBD data, while Yann LeCun’s talk was focused on object detection.

In the award session, Jitendra Malik, Yann LeCun, the LSUN workshop organizers and challenge winners had a photo taken together.

By |July 4th, 2016|News|Comments Off on MCL Member Attended CVPR 2016 in Las Vegas|

MCL Join MediFor Research Project

Professor Jay Kuo has joined an international team led by Professor Ed Delp of Purdue University to develop a system for military intelligence that would detect doctored images and video and determine specifically how they were manipulated.

A huge volume of images and video of potential intelligence value are uploaded daily to the Internet. However, visual media are easily manipulated using software tools that are readily available to the public. The researchers will strive to create an “end-to-end” system capable of handling the massive volume of media uploaded regularly to the Internet. Such a system also could have potential commercial applications, representing a potential tool for news and social media platforms to authenticate images and video before posting them.

The project is funded by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The team’s co-principal investigators are Walter Scheirer, Kevin W. Bowyer, and Patrick J. Flynn from the University of Notre Dame; Anderson Rocha from the University of Campinas in Brazil; C.-C. Jay Kuo from the University of Southern California; Paolo Bestagini and Stefano Tubaro at Politecnico di Milano in Italy; Mauro Barni at the University of Siena in Italy; and Nasir Memon at New York University.

By |June 21st, 2016|News|Comments Off on MCL Join MediFor Research Project|

Professor Kuo Gave Keynote Speech at QoMEX 2016

Professor C.-C. Jay Kuo gave a keynote speech at the 8th International Conference on Quality of Multimedia Experience (QoMEX) in Lisbon, Portugal, on June 6th. The title of his talk is “Perceptual Coding: Hype or Hope?”. The abstract of his talk is given below.
“There has been a significant progress in image/video coding in the last 50 years, and many visual coding standards have been established, including JPEG, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, H.264/AVC and H.265, in the last three decades. The visual coding research field has reached a mature stage, and the question “is there anything left for image/video coding?” arises in recent years. One emerging R&D topic is “perceptual coding”. That is, we may leverage the characteristics of the human visual system (HVS) to achieve a higher coding gain. For example, we may change the traditional quality/distortion measure (i.e., PSNR/MSE) to a new perceptual quality/distortion measure and take visual saliency and spatial-temporal masking effects into account. Recent developments in this area will be reviewed first. However, “is it sufficient to keep visual coding research vibrant and prosperous for another decade with such a modification?” The answer is probably not. In this talk, I will present a new HVS-centric coding framework that is dramatically differently from the past. This framework is centered on two key concepts – the stair quality function (SQF) and the Just-Noticeable-Differences (JND). It will lead to numerous new R&D opportunities and revolutionize coding research with modern machine learning tools.”
Perceptual coding is one of the main activities of the MCL in last 5-6 years. Several PhD students and post-doc have made contributions to this topic, including Sudeng Hu, Yu-Chieh Lin, Lina Jin and Haiqiang Wang. This project has been supported by Netflix [...]

By |June 6th, 2016|News|Comments Off on Professor Kuo Gave Keynote Speech at QoMEX 2016|

Interview with MCL member Yiyue Zhang

In spring 2016, MCL welcomes a new lab member, Yiyue Zhang. We had an short interview with her.

1. Could you briefly introduce yourself? (Previous research experience, project experience, research interest and expertise)
I am a transfer student to USC via a 3/2 dual degree program. I am majoring Electrical Engineering at USC and holding a B.S. Physics degree from my previous school. I used to be a tutor for upper division Physics courses and volunteer as a teaching assistant at a primary school in San Francisco Bay area. Because I just started my study in EE flied, I have limited experience in doing research. After reading some papers and news, I found that I have special interest in computer vision. I would like to start to learn and maybe contribute more in the future on Computer Vision.

2. What’s your first impression of USC and MCL?
USC is a fabulous university. It holds one of the best teaching term and resources in the U.S.. Students come from different countries with various backgrounds and cultures. We help each other and we learn from each other. Its diversity gives every student an opportunity to understand the world not only from classes, but also from each other. USC and its diversity help students to develop both their technical and communicating skills. MCL is a great epitome of the diversity at USC.

3. What’s your future expectation for MCL?
As an undergraduate student in MCL, I am willing to learn more on computer vision. I am hoping to get more experience on doing research.

By |May 9th, 2016|News|Comments Off on Interview with MCL member Yiyue Zhang|
  • Permalink Gallery

    MCL participates in USC/VSoE safety and Security Initiative Project

MCL participates in USC/VSoE safety and Security Initiative Project

MCL is participating in the USC/VSoE safety and Security Initiative Project to develop advanced video surveillance programs using a CNN-based object detection algorithm. MCL director, Prof. C.-C. Jay Kuo, proposed a plan for introducing a robust and accurate detection, tracking and recognition algorithm into the existing USC Department of Public Safety’s (DPS) surveillance infrastructure. Two MCL PhD students, Hao Xu and Eddy Wu, will be developing and implementing the proposed system. One master intern student, Terna Kpamber, has also been assigned to the project to implement the front-end user interface.

The proposed system includes three functionalities. First, the visual data extracted from the DPS cameras will be processed and the metadata (car type, color, etc.) will be extracted out of the available video footage. Second, the metadata will be archived, organized, and utilized to determine the trajectory of the detected vehicle. Third, the vehicle behavior can be retrieved based on its trajectory. The MCL team appreciates the prompt assistance from the USC DPS officers in providing training data and validating the algorithm.

By |May 1st, 2016|News|Comments Off on MCL participates in USC/VSoE safety and Security Initiative Project|
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    Congratulations to Prof. Kuo for receiving 2016 USC Associates Award of Excellence in Teaching

Congratulations to Prof. Kuo for receiving 2016 USC Associates Award of Excellence in Teaching

Congratulations to Professor C.-C. Jay Kuo, MCL Director, for receiving the USC Associates Award for Excellence in Teaching at the 35th Annual Academic Honors Convocation held in on April 12, 2016, in Town and Gown. The citation for Professor Kuo’s achievements in winning the award is repeated below.

“C.-C. Jay Kuo evinces all of the hallmarks of a truly exceptional teacher—an enlivening passion for his work, a genuine interest in seeing others succeed, and a powerful rapport with his students. His friendly, enthusiastic teaching style, and deep knowledge of signal, media, and information processing theory and applications, make his courses some of the most popular in the electrical engineering program. He regularly draws more than 100 graduate students for these courses, usually in multiple sections.

Professor Kuo emphasizes problem solving through hands‐on experience, enabling his students to combine mathematical theory and computational algorithms with real-world applications. His extraordinary reputation is tantamount to his many achievements as a scholar and researcher. He is the author or co‐author of more than 1,000 published papers and a dozen books.

During his 25 years as a member of the USC faculty, Professor Kuo has advised 125 Ph.D. students and supervised more than two dozen post‐doctoral fellows, ranking him first among the top 50 advisors in the Mathematics Genealogy Project, which compiles information on prominent mathematicians across the world. Several former students have earned important research or leadership positions in academia and the engineering industries. Their successes speak volumes about the long-lasting and powerful impact of Professor Kuo’s superb mentorship.

For his unparalleled expertise in the field of engineering, and the profound wisdom and generosity he brings to his work as an educator, the University of Southern California is proud to honor Professor [...]

By |April 17th, 2016|News|Comments Off on Congratulations to Prof. Kuo for receiving 2016 USC Associates Award of Excellence in Teaching|