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Professor Kuo and his research team were recently invited to visit Netflix in Los Gatos to present the latest research results in a collaboration project. Netflix is one of the most successful providers of on-demand Internet streaming media, and is currently the largest single source of Internet traffic in North America. The collaboration project aims to benefit Netflix’s video streaming technology with Professor Kuo’s expertise in video coding and video processing fields. The presentation went well and the discussions were exciting with sharing of experiences and perspectives. With the inspirations, we have confidences to keep delivering valuable results for Netflix in the on-going researches. In addition to the technical meeting, our team members also had a tour in the office, and we were all impressed by the encouraging working environment and atmosphere in Netflix.

Doctor Jing Zhang graduated from Media Communication Lab last month. Before graduation, Jing Zhang was a PhD candidate advised by Professor C.-C. Jay Kuo in Electrical Engineering, and co-advised by Professor Liang Chen in Computational Biology. She worked in statistical methods in RNA-seq data analysis. Doctor Jing Zhang is now a Postdoc associate at Yale University, Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry. We wish her a bright academic career. You can find her publication list here and her presentation in 2012 EE Research Festival here.

The Multimedia Communication Lab actively participated in Discover USC, an open house held for prospective students on November 24th. As one of the largest programs, MCL lab tour aimed at explaining our research and achievements to prospective students who might be interested. To make the tour more fascinating and easy to understand, interesting special effects filter, face warping videos, super resolution images, as well as 3D images and video clips were demonstrated. Many parents and students showed great interests in our research topics and asked a lot of questions during the tour.

The book “Interactive Segmentation Techniques: Algorithms and Performance Evaluation” was published in July, 2013, by Springer Singapore in the series of “SpringerBriefs in Electrical and Computer Engineering / SpringerBriefs in Signal Processing Series”. The authors are Jia He, a PhD student and research assistent at USC, Professor Chang-Su Kim from Korea University, and Professor C.-C. Jay Kuo. The book mainly focuses on interactive image segmentation. It covers the methods which make use of the image features such as colors, edges, contrast, structure, etc., and extract the foreground object information indicated by the users’ interactions, and then provide user-involved segmentation results until the results are acceptable to the users. They also discussed how the existing methods tried to capture users’ desires, improve the segmentation accuracy, accelerate the interaction-process loop, reduce the computation complexity and thus generate reasonable results. Different methodologies may have strengths on particular images. For a particular segmentation task, user can choose and develop a proper method according to their analysis in the book.[expand title=”Read More…” swaptitle=”See Less…”] “Once we worked on a project to convert the 2D video to 3D, we faced a problem to segment the foreground object out.” Jia says. “Since for different images, the foreground objects may have different definitions, we have to provide an interactive segmentation tool to that task. We did a lot of research work on the interactive image segmentation, and found that there had been so many methodologies on this task, and people were trying to provide a segmentation tool that is much easier to control and is more efficient to obtain user desired results. It is hard to say which method is the best, since this topic is still on the way of research, [...]