- Date: September 11, 2011
Where: IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP)
MERL Contacts: Matthew Brand; Anthony Vetro; Petros T. Boufounos Brief - The papers "Distributed Compression of Zerotrees of Wavelet Coefficients" by Wang, Y., Rane, S., Boufounos, P. and Vetro, A., "A Trellis-based Approach for Robust View Synthesis" by Tian, D., Vetro, A. and Brand, M., "Concentric Ring Signature Descriptor for 3D Objects" by Nguyen, H.V. and Porikli, F. and "Parallel Quadratic Programming for Image Processing" by Brand, M. and Chen, D. were presented at the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP).
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- Date: September 2, 2011
Awarded to: Fatih Porikli and Huseyin Ozkan.
Awarded for: "Data Driven Frequency Mapping for Computationally Scalable Object Detection"
Awarded by: IEEE Advanced Video and Signal Based Surveillance (AVSS)
Research Area: Machine Learning
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- Date & Time: Thursday, September 1, 2011; 12:00 PM
Speaker: Alexander Behrens, RWTH Aachen University
MERL Host: Anthony Vetro Abstract - Today, photodynamic diagnostics is commonly used for cancer detection in endoscopic interventions of the urinary bladder. Although the visual contrast between benign and malignant tissue is significantly enhanced using fluorescence markers, the field of view (FOV) of the endoscope becomes very limited. This impedes the navigation and the re-identifying of multi-focal tumors for the physician. Thus, new image mosaicking algorithms and visualization methods, which provide larger FOVs in real-time from free-hand bladder scans are developed and will be presented. Furthermore a novel method for an automatic control of seamless inspections using graphs are addressed. Going beyond image processing, a first low-cost inertial 3-D navigation system will be introduced, and a guided navigation tool for tumor re-identification and its application to virtual endoscopy will be discussed.
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- Date: August 30, 2011
Where: IEEE International Conference on Advanced Video and Signal Based Surveillance (AVSS)
Research Area: Machine Learning
Brief - The paper "Data Driven Frequency Mapping for Computationally Scalable Object Detection" by Porikli, F. and Ozkan, H. was presented at the IEEE International Conference on Advanced Video and Signal Based Surveillance (AVSS).
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- Date: August 29, 2011
Where: British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC)
MERL Contacts: Michael J. Jones; Tim K. Marks Brief - The paper "Pose Normalization via Learned 2D Warping for Fully Automatic Face Recognition" by Asthana, A., Jones, M.J., Marks, T.K., Tieu, K.H. and Goecke, R. was presented at the British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC).
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- Date: August 28, 2011
Where: World Congress of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC)
MERL Contacts: Scott A. Bortoff; Matthew Brand Brief - The papers "Integrated Design and Control of Flexure-Based Nanopositioning Systems - Part I: Methodology" by Shilpiekandula, V. and Youcel-Toumi, K. and "A Parallel Quadratic Programming Algorithm for Model Predictive Control" by Brand, M., Shilpiekandula, V. and Bortoff, S.A. were presented at the World Congress of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC).
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- Date: August 21, 2011
Where: International Conference on Dependability (DEPEND)
MERL Contacts: Jinyun Zhang; Toshiaki Koike-Akino
Research Area: Communications
Brief - The paper "Secret Key Sharing and Rateless Coding for Practical Secure Wireless Transmission" by Liu, W., Duan, C., Wang, Y., Koike-Akino, T., Annavajjala, R. and Zhang, J. was presented at the International Conference on Dependability (DEPEND).
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- Date: August 4, 2011
Where: North American Power Symposium (NAPS)
MERL Contact: Daniel N. Nikovski
Research Area: Optimization
Brief - The paper "State-space Approximate Dynamic Programming for Stochastic Unit Commitment" by Zhang, W. and Nikovski, D. was presented at the North American Power Symposium (NAPS).
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- Date: July 24, 2011
Where: IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS)
MERL Contacts: Dehong Liu; Petros T. Boufounos
Research Area: Computational Sensing
Brief - The paper "High Resolution SAR Imaging Using Random Pulse Timing" by Liu, D. and Boufounos, P.T. was presented at the IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS).
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- Date: July 22, 2011
Where: Chinese Control Conference (CCC)
MERL Contacts: Yebin Wang; Scott A. Bortoff
Research Area: Control
Brief - The paper "Nonlinear Control Design for a Semi-active Vibration Reduction System" by Wang, Y., Utsunomiya, K. and Bortoff, S.A. was presented at the Chinese Control Conference (CCC).
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- Date: July 14, 2011
Where: Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI)
Research Area: Computer Vision
Brief - The paper "Compressed Inference for Probabilistic Sequential Models" by Polatkan, G. and Tuzel, O. was presented at the Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI).
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- Date: June 27, 2011
Where: International Driving Symposium on Human Factors in Driver Assessment, Training and Vehicle Design
Research Area: Speech & Audio
Brief - The paper "Investigating HUDs or the Presentation of Choice Lists in Car navigation Systems" by Weinberg, G., Harsham, B. and Medenica, Z. was presented at the International Driving Symposium on Human Factors in Driver Assessment, Training and Vehicle Design.
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- Date: June 25, 2011
Awarded to: Paul A. Viola and Michael J. Jones
Awarded for: "Rapid Object Detection using a Boosted Cascade of Simple Features"
Awarded by: Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)
MERL Contact: Michael J. Jones
Research Area: Machine Learning
Brief - Paper from 10 years ago with the largest impact on the field: "Rapid Object Detection using a Boosted Cascade of Simple Features", originally published at Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2001).
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- Date: June 23, 2011
Where: Applied Physics Letters
MERL Contacts: Bingnan Wang; Koon Hoo Teo; Jinyun Zhang; William S. Yerazunis
Research Areas: Applied Physics, Electric Systems
Brief - The article "Experiments on Wireless Power Transfer with Metamaterials" by Wang, B., Teo, K.H., Nichino, T., Yerazunis, W., Barnwell, J. and Zhang, J. was published in Applied Physics Letters.
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- Date: June 21, 2011
Where: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)
Research Area: Computer Vision
Brief - The papers "Entropy Rate Superpixel Segmentation" by Liu, M.-Y., Tuzel, O., Ramalingam, S. and Chellappa, R., "Structured Light 3D Scanning in the Presence of Global Illumination" by Gupta, M., Agrawal, A., Veeraraghavan, A. and Narasimhan, S., "CrossTrack: Robust 3D Tracking from Two Cross-Sectional Views" by Hussein, M., Porikli, F., Li, R. and Arsian, S., "P2C2: Programmable Pixel Compressive Camera for High Speed Imaging" by Reddy, D., Veeraraghavan, A. and Chellappa, R., "Beyond Alhazen's Problem: Analytical Projection Model for Non-Central Catadioptric Cameras with Quadric Mirrors" by Agrawal, A., Taguchi, Y. and Ramalingam, S. and "The Light-Path Less Traveled" by Ramalingam, S., Bouaziz, S., Sturm, P. and Torr, P. were presented at the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR).
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- Date & Time: Wednesday, June 15, 2011; 12:00 PM
Speaker: Dr. Yue M. Lu, Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
MERL Host: Petros T. Boufounos Abstract - Before the advent of digital image sensors, photography, for the most part of its history, used film to record light information. In this talk, I will present a new digital image sensor that is reminiscent of photographic film. Each pixel in the sensor has a binary response, giving only a one-bit quantized measurement of the local light intensity.
To analyze its performance, we formulate the binary sensing scheme as a parameter estimation problem based on quantized Poisson statistics. We show that, with a single-photon quantization threshold and large oversampling factors, the Cramer-Rao lower bound of the estimation variance approaches that of an ideal unquantized sensor, that is, as if there were no quantization in the sensor measurements. Furthermore, this theoretical performance bound is shown to be asymptotically achievable by practical image reconstruction algorithms based on maximum likelihood estimators.
Numerical results on both synthetic data and images taken by a prototype sensor verify the theoretical analysis and the effectiveness of the proposed image reconstruction algorithm. They also demonstrate the benefit of using the new binary sensor in applications involving high dynamic range imaging.
Joint work with Feng Yang, Luciano Sbaiz and Martin Vetterli.
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- Date & Time: Tuesday, June 14, 2011; 4:00 PM
Speaker: Tadayoshi Aoyama, Nagoya University
Research Area: Computer Vision
Abstract - First, the concept of "Multi-Locomotion Robot" that has multiple types of locomotion is introduced. The robot is developed to achieve a bipedal walk, a quadruped walk and a brachiation, mimicking locomotion ways of a gorilla. It therefore has higher mobility by selecting a proper locomotion type according to its environment and purpose. I show you some experimental videos with respect to realized motions before now.
Second, I focus on biped walk and talk about detail of bipedal walking. This part proposes a 3-D biped walking algorithm based on Passive Dynamic Autonomous Control (PDAC). The robot dynamics is modeled as an autonomous system of a 3-D inverted pendulum by applying the PDAC concept that is based on the assumption of point contact of the robot foot and the virtual constraint as to robot joints. Due to autonomy, there are two conservative quantities named "PDAC constant", that determine the velocity and direction of the biped walking. We also propose the convergence algorithm to make PDAC constants converge to arbitrary values, so that walking velocity and direction are controllable. Finally, experimental results validate the performance and the energy efficiency of the proposed algorithm.
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- Date: June 8, 2011
Where: IEEE International Symposium on Broadband Multimedia Systems and Broadcasting (BMSB)
MERL Contacts: Jinyun Zhang; Philip V. Orlik
Research Area: Communications
Brief - The paper "Resource Block Embedding: Towards High Throughput Broadband Multimedia Wireless Networks" by Annavajjala, R., Orlik, P.V. and Zhang, J. was presented at the IEEE International Symposium on Broadband Multimedia Systems and Broadcasting (BMSB).
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- Date: June 5, 2011
Where: IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC)
MERL Contacts: Jinyun Zhang; Philip V. Orlik; Toshiaki Koike-Akino Brief - The papers "Reduced-Rate OFDM Transmission with Statistics-based ICI Mitigation" by Ma, J., Orlik, P., Zhang, J. and Li, G.Y., "Super-Resolution Blind Channel Modeling" by Pun, M.-O., Molisch, A.F., Orlik, P. and Okazaki, A., "Network-Coded Interference Alignment in K-Pair Bidirectional Relaying Channels" by Koike-Akino, T., Pun, M.-O. and Orlik, P., "Non-Coherent Grassmann TCM Design for Physical-Layer Network Coding in Bidirectional MIMO Relaying Systems" by Koike-Akino, T. and Orlik, P. and "Order-Extended Sparse RLS Algorithm for Doubly-Selective MIMO Channel Estimation" by Koike-Akino, T., Molisch, A.F., Annavajjala, R., Orlik, P. and Pun, M.-O. were presented at the IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC).
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- Date & Time: Friday, June 3, 2011; 11:00 AM
Speaker: Prof. Namrata Vaswani, Iowa State University
MERL Host: Petros T. Boufounos Abstract - In this talk, I will discuss our recent work on Recursive Sparse Recovery (RecSparsRec) and show how it provides novel solutions to two very different problems in dynamic imaging. RecSparsRec refers to recursive approaches to causally recover a time sequence of signals/images from a greatly reduced number of measurements (compared to existing approaches), by utilizing their sparsity.
The motivating application for RecSparsRec is fast recursive dynamic magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) for real-time applications like MRI-guided surgery. MRI is a technique for cross-sectional imaging that acquires Fourier projections of the cross-section to be reconstructed, one-at-a-time. Thus, the ability to accurately reconstruct using fewer measurements directly translates into reduced scan times. This, along with online (causal) and fast (recursive) reconstruction algorithms, can enable real-time imaging of fast changing physiological phenomena, and thus make real-time MRI feasible. Cross-sectional images of the brain, heart, or other organs are known to be wavelet sparse. Our recent work was the first to observe that, in a time sequence, their sparsity pattern changes quite slowly. Using this fact, we were able to reformulate the RecSparsRec problem as one of sparse reconstruction with partially known support. We introduced a simple, but very powerful, approach called!
Modified-CS that achieves provably exact reconstruction (in the noise-free case) and whose error is provably stable over time (in the noisy case), with using much fewer measurements than existing work. Our preliminary experiments indicate that Modified-CS needs roughly 5-times fewer measurements than existing MR scanner technology and 1.5-times fewer than existing research literature.
I will briefly also discuss our ongoing work on the difficult video analysis problem of separating foreground moving objects from a background scene that is itself is changing and dong this in real-time. This can be posed as a recursive robust principal components analysis (PCA) problem in the presence of correlated sparse outliers or equivalently, as a problem of recursive sparse recovery in the presence of very large, but ``low rank" noise (noise with a low rank covariance matrix).
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- Date & Time: Thursday, June 2, 2011; 12:00 PM
Speaker: Ramesh Annavajjala, MERL
MERL Host: Philip V. Orlik Abstract - For orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) based wireless systems, a resource block (RB) in a two-dimensional time-frequency plane is defined as a data block spanned by a number of consecutive OFDM symbols over a number of consecutive subcarriers. Traditionally, RBs contain modulation symbols for data transmission and pilot symbols for channel estimation.
In this talk, I present a novel approach to RB designs for OFDM systems with multiple antennas at the transmitter and the receiver (i.e., MIMO-OFDM). The proposed approach, termed resource block embedding, does not require explicit pilot symbols to estimate the channel at the receiver, and hence reduces the channel estimation overhead significantly. I describe, in detail, the encoding and decoding algorithms for our proposed embedded resource blocks (ERB) for single-user single-antenna transmission, two transmitter antenna Alamouti code, four transmitter antenna stacked Alamouti code, and multi-stream spatial multiplexing. I also outline construction of ERBs for multi-user MIMO systems.
This is a joint work with Phil Orlik and Jin Zhang.
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- Date: May 23, 2011
Where: IEEE Radar Conference (RadarCon)
Research Area: Signal Processing
Brief - The paper "Low Complexity STAP via Subspace Tracking in Compound-Gaussian Environment" by Wang, P., Pun, M.O. and Sahinoglu, Z. was presented at the IEEE Radar Conference (RadarCon).
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- Date: May 23, 2011
Where: IEEE Transactions on Information Theory
MERL Contact: Petros T. Boufounos
Research Area: Computational Sensing
Brief - The article "Sparse Recovery from Combined Fusion Frame Measurements" by Boufounos, P.T., Kutyniok, G. and Rauhut, H. was published in IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.
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- Date: May 22, 2011
Where: IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP)
MERL Contact: Petros T. Boufounos Brief - The papers "Compressive Sensing for Over-the-Air Ultrasound" by Boufounos, P.T., "Privacy Preserving Probabilistic Inference with Hidden Markov Models" by Pathak, M., Rane, S., Sun, W. and Raj, B., "Saturation-robust SAR Image Formation" by Wei, D. and Boufounos, P.T. and "Scale-Invariant GLRT in Stochastic Partially Homogeneous Environments" by Wang, P., Sahinoglu, Z., Pun, M.-O., Li, H. and Himed, B. were presented at the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP).
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- Date: May 15, 2011
Where: IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS)
MERL Contact: Anthony Vetro
Research Area: Digital Video
Brief - The paper "Efficient Dictionary Based Video Coding with Reduced Side Information" by Kang, J.-W., Kuo, C.-C. J., Cohen, R. and Vetro, A. was presented at the IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS).
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