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Congratulations to Harshad Kadu, Joe Yuchieh Lin and Xiang Fu, who passed their defense last week! Following are their thesis abstracts and they also shared their PhD experiences.

Thesis: Advanced Techniques for Human Action Classification and Text Localization (Harshad Kadu)

The thesis contains two main research topics:

1) Automatic human action classification with mocap data

We propose a TSVQ based multi-resolution string representation scheme that transforms the time-series of human poses into codeword sequences. Temporal and spatial features extracted from these sequences are combined together using novel fusion methods to achieve superior performance.

2) Text localization in natural scene images

Stable extremal region operator detects regions of interest in the proposed multi-stage incremental region classification framework. Geometric filtering, context-based text grouping and ensemble classifier stages, remove false positives and group related text regions into words.

Thesis: Experimental Design and Evaluation Methodology for Human-Centric Visual Quality Assessment (Joe Yuchieh Lin)
The problem of human-centric visual quality assessment (VQA) is extensively studied in this thesis. Our study includes three major topics: 1) design of a dataset for streaming video quality assessment, 2) development of a new and effective video quality assessment index, 3) exploration of a new methodology for human visual quality assessment based on the notion of just-noticeable-differences (JND).
 

Thesis: Advanced Visual Segmentation Techniques: Algorithm Design and Performance Analysis (Xiang Fu)

Two research topics are covered in the dissertation:

1) How to interactively represent and segment the object(s) in a video?

An interactive video object segmentation framework is proposed to handle complex and diverse scenes with large motion and occlusions, which outperforms the state-of-the-art Adobe After Effect.

2) How to reliably generate automatic image segmentation?

Region-Dependent Spectral Graph is designed to fuse contour, surface, and depth cues according to the type of regions. Depth cue can further merge the regions in the textured area, which is never applied for segmentation before.

Contour-guided Color [...]

MCL has a new Ph.D student, Hsin-Ying Lee in Fall 2015. Let’s give Hsin-Ying a warm welcome!

Hsin-Ying received B.S. degree from the EE Department of National Taiwan University in 2014 Spring. He got the USC-Taiwan Fellowship award and decided to join USC MCL to pursue his Ph.D degree beginning from this Fall semester. We had a brief interview with him.

What is your first impression of USC and MCL?

USC is quite an impassioned and multicultural place. People in MCL are full of enthusiasms for cutting-edge research.

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

My previous research field was electronic design automation (EDA). I led a team to win two international computer-aided design (CAD) contests. I had joined a MediaTek project about datapath extraction and placement. Now I would like to dive into computer vision and start a new journey of research. Currently, my research interests are biomedical related subjects, depth estimation from single image, etc..

What’s your future expectation for MCL?

Because I am just a beginner in computer vision, I have a lot to learn. I hope I can develop some advanced and useful solutions for computer vision problem. On the other hand, I am looking forward to getting to know all team members in the lab and becoming friends with all of you. It is my honor to work with so many brilliant colleagues and I hope I will be a good teammate as well.

Three MCL students presented their case studies about business startups in industry in the last lecture of the entrepreneurship course this summer.

Chien-Yi Wang presented Adobe. Adobe has historically focused upon the creation of multimedia and creativity software products, with a more recent trend towards rich Internet application software development, including digital marketing and digital media solutions. The company is famous for its development on the “Portable Document Format”, which is adopted worldwide as a common medium for electronic documents. After the hallmark technology of PDF standard, they were devoted to develop powerful software and services for people to create suitable digital content, deploy it across media and devices, measure and optimize it over time and achieve greater business success. Adobe has a unique business model which could optimize the revenue by distributing their products in several ways. The company spent lots of money on the marketing side which allowed them to stand out among their competitors. Nowadays, their products all go on the cloud for customer to subscribe and make people easier to collaborate and use via different platforms. Adobe is also leading computer vision researches which could benefit the whole digital media community.

Eddy Wu presented Fitbit Inc. Fitbit is one of the most well-known technology companies that produce activity trackers – the wireless wearable devices that measure data such as number of steps, quality of sleep, and other personal metrics. Fitbit is a fast growing company since its establishment; its revenue increased from $14.5 million in 2011 to $745 million in 2014. Fitbit went public in Jun, 2015, and the shares jumped to about $30 a piece at IPO day and valued the company over $6 billion. There are many reasons for its huge success. First of all, while its competitors put more efforts on the hardware development, [...]

In the last lecture of the entrepreneurship short course, three MCL interns presented their final projects – case studies on successful companies. Their successful and impressive presentations showcased remarkable amount of time and effort they had devoted to the projects. By finishing these projects, the interns acquired fundamental business knowledge and rich experience on technology and business innovations in the MCL.

Kevin Wang presented Zappos, a thriving online shoe and clothing store. Zappos was founded in 1999 by Nick Swinmurn and obtained their first investment funds of $500,000 from Tony Hsieh of Ventures Frog, who joined Zappos one year later, serving as the Co-CEO. According to Kevin, what distinguishes Zappos from other companies is its core value, “Deliver Happiness”. For its employees, Zappos creates a happy and family-like work environment. For its customers, Zappos wants to “wow” the customer so that he or she will come back. Knowing how to retain its customers is what keeps Zappos profitable. Each of its employees needs to go through a four-month training to improve their capability in serving customers and implementing company culture. It’s no wonder that Zappos has an estimated 75% customer retention rate.  In 2014, Zappos faced a major change in the way it was structured in 2014. It began its transition from a traditional corporate structure to a holacracy, a new type of corporate structure designed to improve communication flow.

Matthew Trans presented Riot Games, an unquestionable world top-tier game development company despite of the fact that it only has one game: League of Legends. Even though League of Legends is a free game, Riot still managed to attain revenue of $624 million last year just from microtransactions. Riot’s success roots deeply in its philosophy of creating the most-player-focused game in history. At Riot, players come first, and revenue second. Not only does Riot’s priority [...]

Joe Yuchieh Lin, a member of MCL, attended ICME 2015 hosted in Turin, Italy from June 29th to July 3rd to present his work in the Cloud based Media (CbM) Workshop. ICME has been the flagship multimedia conference since 2000. It serves as a forum to promote the exchange of the latest advances in multimedia technologies, systems, and applications. The CbM workshop is added this year since Cloud Computing arises as a promising solution to reserve assets on demand and guarantee their provision over time. The solution lies in the design and development of an abstraction entity that is responsible to manage the media resources and the network capabilities, acting as a mediator between the client application and the media-aware cloud.

The conference, according to Joe, covers a wide range of topics in multimedia processing, all of which may lead to the most excellent research ideas. The sessions are relatively smaller but the discussions are more active. Besides, Turin is a beautiful city with history in cinema industry and presents transition from past to modern technologies in multimedia. The trip is not only full of multimedia technologies but also the artistic atmosphere in the city.

Joe presented his work in the CbM workshop. His paper is titled “EVQA: AN ENSEMBLE-LEARNING-BASED VIDEO QUALITY ASSESSMENT INDEX”. This paper proposes a scalable solution of video quality assessment method. EVQA adopts a frame-based learning mechanism to address the limited training data problem and fuses multiple image quality assessment indices to generate the final video quality score. The superior performance of the proposed EVQA index is demonstrated by experimental results conducted on both LIVE and MCL-V video databases.