Dr. Hui Yong Kim, a senior researcher of Broadcasting and Telecommunications Media Research Laboratory of Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) and also a former adjunct professor at University of Science and Technology (UST) in Korea, visited Media Communication Lab since September 2013. He generously spent some of his short time with us to share his research.

Could you give us a brief introduction about your research experience?

I would like to start from my PhD research experience. I worked on visual surveillance project during my PhD years, and the project required object detection and segmentation from videos. By separating background and foreground, I compressed detected objects and background differently to increase quality of objects area. After graduation, I joined a start-up company because I wanted to get a whole picture of how the real devices are developed. There, I mainly developed H.264 real-time codec software for several video communication systems, such as IP video phone and other consumer products. Because I was a manager in multimedia team, I also needed to care other issues like middle-wares, communication protocols, audio codecs, graphical user interfaces, and even mechanical designs. After few years, I decided to move to ETRI to continue my research path. In ETRI, I participated and contributed to developments of several international standards, including MPEG Multimedia Application Formats and High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC). During the process, I developed more than 70 patent algorithms.

Could you also talk about your research interest?

My research interests include video/image signal processing and compression for realistic video services, such as UHDTV and 3DTV. They are called as “realistic media”, which implies making things real to human. My research goal is how to maximize visual reality to the user efficiently under given constraints (such as bandwidth).

The research I am currently working on in MCL is related to the realistic representation and coding mentioned earlier. The topic is “perceptual lossless HD/UHD video coding”. More specifically, I want to maximize subjective quality instead of using traditional metric like PSNR quality. Furthermore, I am focusing on solving challenge scenes for video compression under same bit-rate constraint, and those scenes include dark scene, fast movement, and high texture. Hopefully I can improve the visual quality by taking care of all those challenges.

At the end of this interview, is there anything else to say about our lab?

MCL is a large group, so it is beneficial for me to observe and learn how Prof. Kuo managing this lab. It is a priceless experience for me to learn management skill and improve my research achievement on video coding. I am glad to have this opportunity to join MCL and work with Prof. Kuo.