- Date: Thursday, August 1, 2013
MERL Contact: Anthony Vetro Brief - Anthony Vetro is Guest Editor for the Special Issue on 3D Representation, Compression & Rendering of the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing.
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- Date: Wednesday, July 3, 2013 - Friday, July 5, 2013
Location: Klagenfurt am Worthersee, Austria
MERL Contact: Anthony Vetro Brief - Anthony Vetro is the publicity chair for America of QoMEX 2013, the Fifth International Workshop on Quality of Multimedia Experience, to be held Klagenfurt am Worthersee, Austria, in July 2013.
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- Date & Time: Thursday, May 30, 2013; 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM
Location: Vancouver, Canada
MERL Contacts: Anthony Vetro; Petros T. Boufounos; Jonathan Le Roux
Research Area: Speech & Audio
Brief - MERL is a sponsor for the first ICASSP Student Career Luncheon that will take place at ICASSP 2013. MERL members will take part in the event to introduce MERL and talk with students interested in positions or internships.
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- Date: May 26, 2013
Where: IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP)
MERL Contacts: Dehong Liu; Jianlin Guo; Anthony Vetro; Petros T. Boufounos; Jonathan Le Roux Brief - The papers "Stereo-based Feature Enhancement Using Dictionary Learning" by Watanabe, S. and Hershey, J.R., "Effectiveness of Discriminative Training and Feature Transformation for Reverberated and Noisy Speech" by Tachioka, Y., Watanabe, S. and Hershey, J.R., "Non-negative Dynamical System with Application to Speech and Audio" by Fevotte, C., Le Roux, J. and Hershey, J.R., "Source Localization in Reverberant Environments using Sparse Optimization" by Le Roux, J., Boufounos, P.T., Kang, K. and Hershey, J.R., "A Keypoint Descriptor for Alignment-Free Fingerprint Matching" by Garg, R. and Rane, S., "Transient Disturbance Detection for Power Systems with a General Likelihood Ratio Test" by Song, JX., Sahinoglu, Z. and Guo, J., "Disparity Estimation of Misaligned Images in a Scanline Optimization Framework" by Rzeszutek, R., Tian, D. and Vetro, A., "Screen Content Coding for HEVC Using Edge Modes" by Hu, S., Cohen, R.A., Vetro, A. and Kuo, C.C.J. and "Random Steerable Arrays for Synthetic Aperture Imaging" by Liu, D. and Boufounos, P.T. were presented at the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP).
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- Date: Sunday, May 19, 2013 - Thursday, May 23, 2013
Location: Beijing, China
MERL Contact: Anthony Vetro Brief - Anthony Vetro is the Demo Co-chair of ISCAS 2013, the IEEE International Symposium on Circuits & Systems, to be held in Beijing, China, in May 2013.
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- Date: May 19, 2013
Where: IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS)
MERL Contact: Anthony Vetro
Research Area: Digital Video
Brief - The paper "View Synthesis Prediction Using Skip and Merge Candidates for HEVC-based 3D Video Coding" by Zou, F., Tian, D. and Vetro, A. was presented at the IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS).
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- Date: May 8, 2013
Where: Conference on Telecommunications (Conftele)
MERL Contact: Anthony Vetro
Research Area: Digital Video
Brief - The paper "Analysis of Depth Map Resampling Filters for Depth-based 3D Video Coding" by Graziosi, D.B., Rodrigues, N.M.M., de Faria, S.M.M., Tian, D. and Vetro, A. was presented at the Conference on Telecommunications (Conftele).
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- Date & Time: Friday, May 3, 2013; 12:00 PM
Speaker: Prof. Thrasyvoulos N. Pappas, Northwestern University
MERL Host: Anthony Vetro Abstract 
Texture is an important visual attribute both for human perception and image analysis systems. We present new structural texture similarity metrics and applications that critically depend on such metrics, with
emphasis on image compression and content-based retrieval. The new metrics account for human visual perception and the stochastic nature of textures. They rely entirely on local image statistics and allow substantial point-by-point deviations between textures that according to human judgment are similar or essentially identical.
We also present new testing procedures for objective texture similarity metrics. We identify three operating domains for evaluating the performance of such similarity metrics: the top of the similarity scale, where a monotonic relationship between metric values and subjective scores is desired; the ability to distinguish between perceptually similar and dissimilar textures; and the ability to retrieve "identical" textures. Each domain has different performance goals and requires different testing procedures. Experimental results similarity metrics demonstrate both the performance of the proposed metrics and the effectiveness of the proposed subjective testing procedures.
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- Date: May 1, 2013
Where: Emerging Technologies for 3D Video: Creation, Coding, Transmission and Rendering
MERL Contact: Anthony Vetro
Research Area: Digital Video
Brief - The article "Depth Based 3D Video Formats and Coding Technology" by Vetro, A. and Muller, K. was published in the book Emerging Technologies for 3D Video: Creation, Coding, Transmission and Rendering.
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- Date & Time: Thursday, March 21, 2013; 12:00 PM
Speaker: Prof. Antonio Ortega, University of Southern California
MERL Host: Anthony Vetro Abstract 
Graphs have long been used in a wide variety of problems, such analysis of social networks, machine learning, network protocol optimization, decoding of LDPCs or image processing. Techniques based on spectral graph theory provide a "frequency" interpretation of graph data and have proven to be quite popular in multiple applications.
In the last few years, a growing amount of work has started extending and complementing spectral graph techniques, leading to the emergence of "Graph Signal Processing" as a broad research field. A common characteristic of this recent work is that it considers the data attached to the vertices as a "graph-signal" and seeks to create new techniques (filtering, sampling, interpolation), similar to those commonly used in conventional signal processing (for audio, images or video), so that they can be applied to these graph signals.
In this talk, we first introduce some of the basic tools needed in developing new graph signal processing operations. We then introduce our design of wavelet filterbanks of graphs, which for the first time provides a multi-resolution, critically-sampled, frequency- and graph-localized transforms for graph signals. We conclude by providing several examples of how these new transforms and tools can be applied to existing problems. Time permitting, we will discuss applications to image processing, depth video compression, recommendation system design and network optimization.
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- Date & Time: Thursday, December 13, 2012; 12:00 PM
Speaker: Dr. Tomasz M. Grzegorczyk, Delpsi LLC
MERL Host: Anthony Vetro Abstract - Electromagnetic (EM) remote sensing is a well-established modality for the detection, tracking, and identification of concealed targets. The degree of freedom offered by the operating frequency (and the associated propagation or induction regimes) make EM waves sufficiently versatile to interrogate both large as well as small structures, metallic as well as dielectric objects, in close proximity or further away. This wide flexibility has made EM remote sensing a modality of choice in many applications. This presentation will focus on two implementations of non-destructive and non-contact EM sensing. The first is based on a tomographic approach, whereby EM waves are used to infer material properties within the volume of accessible structures. The two examples to be discussed are breast cancer detection, i.e. locating areas of high vascularity in otherwise healthy biological tissues, and inspection of concrete structures, i.e. identifying volumetric material property variations to locate rebars and cracks. The second area we will discuss is that of subsurface target detection, with again two very different applications. The first pertains to ground penetrating radars with frequencies in the GHz aimed at the detection of buried weak dielectric scatterers, whereas the second focuses on the detection of metallic targets in the magnetic induction regime, for which much lower frequencies are used. In all these applications, the data collected by the appropriate hardwares are processed by combining fundamental EM concepts with inverse methods for parameter estimation. We will discuss both a deterministic method -- Gauss-Newton -- and a stochastic method -- Kalman filters for real time target detection.
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- Date: Monday, December 3, 2012 - Thursday, December 6, 2012
Location: Hollywood, CA
MERL Contact: Anthony Vetro Brief - MERL is a sponsor for APSIPA 2012, the fourth annual conference organized by Asia-Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association.
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- Date: December 3, 2012
Where: Asia-Pacific Signal & Information Processing Association Annual Summit and Conference
MERL Contacts: Anthony Vetro; Huifang Sun Brief - The papers "Depth Map Up-sampling Based on Edge Layers" by Graziosi, D.B., Tian, D. and Vetro, A. and "Joint Perceptually-based Intra Prediction and Quantization for HEVC" by Jin, G., Cohen, R., Vetro, A. and Sun, H. were presented at the Asia-Pacific Signal & Information Processing Association Annual Summit and Conference.
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- Date: Wednesday, October 17, 2012 - Friday, October 19, 2012
Location: Portsmouth, NH
MERL Contact: Anthony Vetro Brief - MERL is a sponsor for the Fourth International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications, Automotive UI 2012.
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- Date: Sunday, September 30, 2012 - Wednesday, October 3, 2012
Location: Orlando, FL
MERL Contact: Anthony Vetro Brief - Anthony Vetro is the Industrial Co-chair of ICIP 2012, the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing, to be held in Orlando, Florida, in September 2012.
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- Date: September 30, 2012
Where: IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP)
MERL Contacts: Anthony Vetro; Huifang Sun Brief - The papers "An Attribute-Based Framework for Privacy Preserving Image Querying" by Rane, S. and Sun, W., "Emerging Cryptographic Challenges in Image and Video Processing" by Puech, W., Erkin, Z., Barni, M., Rane, S. and Lagendijk, R.L., "A Local Depth Image Enhancement Scheme for View Synthesis" by Wang, Y., Tian, D. and Vetro, A. and "On Modeling the Rendering Error in 3D Video" by Cheung, N.-M., Tian, D., Vetro, A. and Sun, H. were presented at the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP).
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- Date: August 12, 2012
Where: SPIE Conference on Applications of Digital Image Processing
MERL Contact: Anthony Vetro
Research Area: Digital Video
Brief - The paper "Analysis of 3D and Multiview Extensions of the Emerging HEVC Standard" by Vetro, A. and Tian, D. was presented at the SPIE Conference on Applications of Digital Image Processing.
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- Date & Time: Friday, July 6, 2012; 12:00 PM
Speaker: Zixiang Xiong, Texas A&M University
MERL Host: Anthony Vetro Abstract - Driven by a host of emerging applications, distributed source coding has assumed renewed interest in the past decade. Although the Slepian-Wolf theorem has been known for almost 40 years and progresses have been made recently on the rate region of quadratic Gaussian two-terminal source coding, finding the sum-rate bound of quadratic Gaussian multiterminal source coding with more than two terminals is still an open problem. In this talk, I'll briefly go over existing results on distributed source coding problems before describing a set of new results we obtained recently.
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- Date: May 7, 2012
Where: Picture Coding Symposium (PCS)
MERL Contacts: Anthony Vetro; Huifang Sun
Research Area: Digital Video
Brief - The paper "Predictive Coding of Intra Prediction Modes for High Efficiency Video Coding" by Xu, X., Cohen, R., Vetro, A. and Sun, H. was presented at the Picture Coding Symposium (PCS).
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- Date & Time: Friday, March 30, 2012; 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Location: Kyoto, Japan
MERL Contact: Anthony Vetro Brief - Anthony Vetro co-organized a Special Session of ICASSP 2012 on Signal-Processing Challenges and Opportunities in Depth Cameras. ICASSP 2012 will be held in Kyoto, Japan, in March 2012.
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- Date & Time: Tuesday, February 21, 2012; 12:00 PM
Speaker: Dimitri Androutsos, Richard Rzeszutek, Ryerson University
MERL Host: Anthony Vetro Abstract - The problem of converting monoscopic footage into stereoscopic or multi-view content is inherently difficult and ill-posed. On the surface, this does not appear to be the case as the problem may be summed up as, "Given single-view image or video, create one or more views as if they were taken from a different camera view." However, capturing a three-dimensional scene as a two-dimensional image is a lossy process and any information regarding the distance of objects to the camera is lost. Methods exist for extracting depth information from a monoscopic view and it is possible to obtain metrically-correct depth estimates under certain conditions. But since conversion is primarily used as a post-processing stage in film production, the user requires a degree of control over the results. This, in turn, makes it ill-posed as there is no way to know ahead of time what the user wants from the conversion. In this talk we will present the work being done at Ryerson University on user-guided 2D-to-3D conversion. In particular, we will focus on how existing image segmentation techniques may be combined to produce reasonable depth maps for conversion while still providing complete control to the user. We will also discuss how our research can be applied to both images and video without any significant alterations to our methods.
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- Date: Monday, February 6, 2012 - Friday, February 10, 2012
Location: San Jose, CA
MERL Contact: Anthony Vetro Brief - MERL is a sponsor for the 99th MPEG meeting to be held in San Jose, CA, in February 2012. MERL researcher Anthony Vetro serves as Head of the US Delegation to MPEG.
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- Date: Monday, October 17, 2011 - Wednesday, October 19, 2011
Location: Hangzhou, China
MERL Contact: Anthony Vetro Brief - Anthony Vetro is the General Co-chair of MMSP 2011, the IEEE Multimedia Signal Processing Workshop, to be held in Hangzhou, China, in October 2011.
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- Date: Monday, October 17, 2011 - Wednesday, October 19, 2011
Location: Hangzhou, China
MERL Contact: Anthony Vetro Brief - MERL is a sponsor for the 2011 edition of the IEEE Multimedia Signal Processing Workshop.
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- 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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