News

Congratulations to Hyunsuk Ko, a current MCL member, for getting an offer from the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ERTI).ETRI is one of the best known Korean research labs in the area of information and communications technologies with international reputation and visibility. Hyunsuk has accepted the offer and will join the Department of “Realistic Broadcasting Media Research” as a senior researcher. He will conduct research on 3D/UHDTV broadcasting technology, high-efficiency/scalable video coding etc. in the next several years.

Hyunsuk said, “Most companies are actively hiring good candidates nowadays. There are more openings for software engineers than any other positions because giant IT companies such as Google, Amazon, Facebook etc. are leading the market. On the other hand, if you have an expertise in big data analysis, machine learning and computer vision, the chance to get a decent offer increases significantly, which means that MCL members do have a bright future.”

Hyunsuk got offers from Korean companies such as Samsung and LG and Korean national research lab, ETRI. He had interviews with US companies such as Apple, Google, and Amazon as well. After pondering his future career between ETRI and these IT companies, Hyunsuk eventually decided to join ETRI to be an academic researcher rather than being an engineer. Besides, his research background fits the need of the ETRI team very well.

Looking backward on his PhD life, Hyunsuk said that his major growth came from the process of being trained as an independent researcher. Hyunsuk got his MS degree by working on H.264/AVC video coding only. In contrast, he conducted research on quite a few topics during his PhD years, such as 2D-to-3D conversion, HEVC-based 3D video, objective quality metric development for stereoscopic images, and other stereovision [...]

In March 2015, MCLab has a new visiting scholar, Prof. Songbin Li. Prof. Li is Professor at Institute of Acoustics, Chinese Academy of Science, China. We are glad to have an interview with him, talking about his previous research experiences and future expectations at USC.

1. Could you briefly introduce yourself and describe your previous research experience?

I come from the Institute of Acoustics (IOA) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). Before joining IOA in 2012, I received my Ph.D. from the National Network New Media Engineering Research Center (3NMedia), Institute of Acoustics, Chinese Academy of Science in 2010 and then I worked as a post-doc in the Department of Electronic Engineering at Tsinghua University. My research focuses on multimedia signal processing especially on multimedia forensics and security, as well as steganography and steganalysis. I am also interested in creative technology related to network new media, such as computer animation and film special effects production technology.

2. What is your first impression of USC and MCLab?

USC is a world-famous university and the campus is very beautiful. USC is full of diversity, where students and faculties are from various countries and ethnic groups. As for MCLab, Prof. Kuo has, to a remarkable extent, a global reputation in multimedia technology area. Under his lead, the MCLab is vital and high-yielding of scientific papers. The students in MCLab are all very smart, enthusiastic and hard-working. I think they will make a difference in the future.

3. What is your future expectation and plan in MCLab? ​

I have several aims of my visit. First, I would like to join a certain subgroup related to steganography and steganalysis, aiming to make some contribution to MCLab. Second, I hope to continue the research [...]

MCL Director, Professor C.-C. Jay Kuo, was invited to be a speaker and panelist in the Innovation Theme session “Big Data: Challenges and Opportunities in Computing and Communications” of the IEEE International Conference on Networking and Communications (ICNC), held in Anaheim, California, February 16-19, 2015. ICNC 2015 was technically co-sponsored by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Communications Society, financially sponsored by Technology Innovation Association. It is alternately held in Hawaii and California every year.

Professor Kuo pointed out two main challenges in big data – the filtering problem and the prediction problem. The filtering problem refers to how to find useful and relevant information from a huge amount of data. Although data is in huge amount, the information of interest is little. A lot of noise exists and buries the important information. Professor Kuo used “finding a needle in a haystack” as an analogy. One immediate scientific method to address this problem is to develop a more advanced search engine for image/video exploiting computer vision techniques. The prediction problem asked how to predict future trends, for instance, to predict the explosion of a large flu or the results of political elections, based on existing data. Professor Kuo emphasized that we need to find out “does big data truly help increase prediction accuracy or does it in fact confuse people with noise”.

In addition, Professor Kuo, in his speech, addressed one challenge in big visual data communication, that is, the broadband video is too expensive to be transmitted in a massive distributed manner. He proposed an alternative, which is to exploit “semantic compression” where the computer vision technology can be used to tag video contents so that, instead of sending video, only meta data such as tags [...]

Ms. Lina Jin started her PhD study from January 2011 at the Computing Imaging group, Department of Signal Processing, Tampere University of Technology, Finland. Since 2011, She has been co-supervised by Prof. C.-C. Jay Kuo from the University of Southern California. From October 2013 to December 2014, she has been working at Prof. Kuo’s Media Communications Lab as a visiting scholar.

Congratulations to Lina Jin for passing her public examination on January 30, 2015. The title of her dissertation is “Perceptual Quality Assessment for Visual Signal”. Her dissertation was pre-examined by Prof. Patrick LeCallet (Université de Nantes/Ecole Polytechnique de l’Université de Nantes, France) and Prof. Weisi Lin (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore). The opponent is Prof. Mårten Sjöström from Mid Sweden University, Sweden.

With the rapid growth of information technology and the Internet, image and video have become one part of our everyday life and their quality is of prime importance for numerous applications. The aim of realistic digital image and video is to create accurate, high quality imagery, which faithfully represents the physical environment. The ultimate goal is to create images that are perceptually indistinguishable from the actual scene. Thus, the automatic evaluation of image and video quality plays a critical role in the fields of image and video processing and there are many practical applications, such as quality monitoring to maintain Quality of Service (QoS) requirements, the evaluation of video processing for compression, and perceptually optimal design of video processing systems. Ms. Lina Jin’s dissertation investigates and analyses image artifacts resulting from various 2D and 3D image/video applications and explores human visual perception of different image artifacts through subjective experiments. She conducted in designing and building a large new image quality database, TID2013. TID2013 provides [...]

Congratulations to Mr. Pang-Cheng (Brian) Lan for passing his Qualifying Exam on January 22, 2015. The title of Brian’s thesis proposal is “Enhancing Secrecy in Wireless Environment with Only Channel State Information: Theory and Applications”. His Qualifying Exam committee consisted of Jay Kuo (Chair), Keith Chugg, Andy Molisch, Salman Avestimehr and Wlodek Proskurowski (Outside Member).

In his proposal, Brian shows the advantages of having only transmitter-side channel state information (CSI) but none or limited CSI at the receiver and the eavesdropper in wiretap channels. With CSI only at the transmitter (CSIT), distortion and interference on the main channel can be pre-compensated by the transmitter to facilitate detection at the receiver while leaving the eavesdropper confused by the uncertainties of its own channel. These ideas are first tested in the case of finite-alphabet discrete memoryless wiretap channels, where the secrecy capacity expression is derived, and are then applied to two practical scenarios, namely, fading wiretap channels and those with Gaussian interference. Truncation-based schemes are proposed to ensure that the transmission occurs only when the main channel is sufficiently reliable. Furthermore, a practical unitary modulation scheme is recommended as application of exploiting the benefits of having CSIT in secrecy for multi-antenna communication systems in which Long Term Evolution (LTE) is used as an example. The achievable secrecy rates of the proposed schemes are derived and asymptotic or approximate expressions are proposed for the optimization purpose. The effectiveness of the proposed transmission schemes and the advantages of having only CSIT are demonstrated through numerical simulations.