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Chun-Ting Huang, a member of MCL, attended CVPR 2015 hosted in Boston from June 8th to 12th to present his work in Biometric Workshop. The conference was held in Hynes Convention Center, where researchers from all over the world gathered to present their state-of-the-art results. There were six oral sessions, five poster sessions, and two plenary talks given by Yann LeCun and Jack L. Gallant. Unlike last year, CVPR newly added CNN Architectures into this year’s oral session, showing that CNN has been widely recognized and accepted by computer vision society.

According to Chun-Ting, “there were thousands of attendees presented in this large-scale event, and many interesting ideas were brought up and discussed with different aspects. It is an amazing and fruitful experience to me. I believe every researcher who attended this event surely has learned more than he/she originally expected.”

Chun-Ting presented his work in Biometric Workshop, and his paper’s title was “TAEF: A Cross-Distance/Environment Face Recognition Method”. This system provides a cross-distance face alignment, a cross-environment face enhancement, and a two-stage coarse-to-fine approach to handle long distance faces. The performance of this method achieves 97% first rank accuracy on 150 meter visible-light images in the LDHF database.

The Viterbi-India program is jointly funded by the Indo US Science, Technology Forum (IUSSTF) and the USC VSoE. Each student in the Viterbi-India program will receive stipend and travel reimbursement. These students will come to USC and join one of the labs under EE department during May 20 and July 18, 2015.

After a competitive review process, there will be 20 spots for the Indian students in the program. Among those strong Indian students, Vikranth Reddy is the one who will join MCL in 2015 summer as an intern. We conducted a short interview with him about his previous experiences and future expectations.

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

I am Vikranth Dwaracherla, a third year undergraduate from IIT Bombay, India. I am currently pursuing my major in Electrical Engineering and minors in Computer Science. My previous research projects include neural networks, device simulations and image processing. I am very interested in the fields of computer vision and robotics. I have been working on a project on autonomous fruit collecting robot.

2.What was your first impression of USC and MCL?

USC is a wonderful place and provides opportunities for all people invariant of their interests. It is a wonderful place where people can pursue their goals. The members in the lab are all very kind and willing to help others. I would like to thank all the members of MCLab for the hospitality shown towards me.

3.What is your further expectation of being an MCL member?

I am very happy to be selected into the Viterbi- India Program and come to USC, one of the leading institutions in the field of Engineering and Technology. I am also very pleased to join MCLab, and to have the opportunity to work with [...]

Five MCL members attended the Viterbi PhD hooding ceremony on Thursday, May 14, 2014, from 8:30-11:00 a.m. in the Bovard Auditorium. They were Sachin Chachada, Xiang Fu, Pang-Chang Lan, Sudeng Hu, and Joe Yuchieh Lin. Congratulations to them and their families for their accomplishments in completing their PhD program at USC.

Sachin Chachada received his B.E. degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from S.R.K.N.E.C., RTM Nagpur University 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, and machine learning with applications to image and audio analysis. His dissertation, entitled “Environmental Sound Recognition: Classification and Retrieval,” discusses the algorithms that can be used to advance general audio understanding and management. His work demonstrates superior performance of ensemble learning algorithm for environmental audio classification, with use of classical, contemporary and a new set of time-frequency features. His work also includes novel algorithms for environmental sound retrieval for a large database, with promising applications for audio content management.

Xiang Fu received his B.S. degree in Electronic Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU), China in 2009, and his M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering and in Computer Science, both from University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles in 2011 and 2014, respectively. Since 2011, he has been pursuing his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering with Media Communications Lab (MCL) at USC advised by Prof. C.-C. Jay Kuo, and has been working on various research areas including image/video segmentation, spectral clustering, visual tracking, object recognition, video surveillance, and machine learning. His dissertation, entitled “An Information Fusion Approach to Visual Data Segmentation”, discusses feature fusions [...]

Face recognition has been studied and developed for over decades. However, the long distance face recognition accompanied with automatic alignment is still a challenging topic due to its distorted and quality-degraded environment. This problem is also known as Face Recognition at A Distance (FRAD), which is a common issue in video surveillance applications.

A solution to FRAD has been proposed by MCL PhD student, Chun-Ting Huang, visiting scholar from UESTC, Professor Zhengning Wang, and Professor C.-C. Jay Kuo.  The method called Two-Stage Alignment/Enhancement Filtering (TAEF) system consists of three main components: a cross-distance face alignment technique, a cross-environment face enhancement technique, and a two-stage filtering system. In the first stage, the given probe image is adjusted and examined in coarse-scale for eliminating unlikely candidates, and then the procedure is conducted for every individual probe/gallery image pair for higher accuracy at the second stage. The first rank recognition rates of the TAEF method are 100%, 100% and 97% for 60-, 100- and 150-meter visible-light images in the LDHF database, respectively.

This work has been accepted for publication in the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2015 Workshop on Biometrics held in Boston, June 11th, 2015.

Professor C.-C. Jay Kuo attended 2015 APSIPA Annual Summit Conference (ASC) in Siem Reap, Cambodia, December 9-12. APSIPA represents “Asia Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association”, which was founded in 2009. Professor Sadaoki Furui was the first President (2009-2012) while Prof. Jay Kuo was the second (2012-2014). During his tenure, Professor Kuo launched a major membership campaign through recruiting APSIPA Friend Labs. Right now, APSIPA has around 3200 e-members in the LinkedIn Social Network and 260 APSIPA Friend Labs.

Professor Kosin Chamnongthai of King Mongkut’s University of Technology (Thailand), Professor Hitoshi Kiya of Tokyo Metropolitan University (Japan) and Professor Kuo were General Co-Chairs of APSIPA ASC 2014. The conference location, Siem Reap, is the home to the incredible Angkor ruins, a sprawling World Heritage-listed complex of ancient temples, including Angkor Wat, Angkor Thom, etc. Professor Kuo met a couple of MCL alumni from Korea and Taiwan.

Professor Kuo completed his two-year term of APSIPA President immediately after this conference, and Dr. Haizhou Li of Singapore has succeed Professor Kuo to become the new President of APSIPA. Dr. Li is a world renowned expert and technical leader in speech processing and recognition.