Professorial Lecture Series

" Photons, Pixels, Pictures - Action "
Professor Philip Ogunbona

Wednesday 30th August 2006 (12:30-1:30pm), Building 14.G01

Digital imaging has recently been popularised by the availability of affordable digital cameras. Good quality images can be captured with both CCD (charged coupled devices) and CMOS (complimentary metal oxide semiconductor) sensor based cameras. This development has turned the average consumer into digital content creators.
It is not uncommon to come back from a holiday with a thousand photographs. Apart from keeping a record of peoples' experiences, digital images and videos find practical applications in the areas of security surveillance, robotics, multimedia presentation and scientific imaging.
These applications present several technical challenges ranging from high fidelity capture, through efficient storage and transmission to semantically meaningful retrieval. The problem of storage is largely solved by such compression tools as JPEG and JPEG2000. Still unsolved are the problems of automatic annotation of images and retrieval of images based on user queries.
In this talk we provide an overview of a digital imaging pipeline - capture, storage, annotation, retrieval. We discuss some of our research results in the capture, storage and retrieval processes. A short demonstration of results in image retrieval will be presented.