Perception-driven Multimedia Processing Lab

School of Computer Engineering, Nanyang Technological University

Weisi Lin graduated from Zhongshan University, China with B.Sc in Electronics and M.Sc in Digital Signal Processing in 1982 and 1985, respectively, and from King's College, London University, UK with Ph.D in Computer Vision in 1992. He taught and researched in Zhongshan University, Shantou University (China), Bath University (UK), National University of Singapore, Institute of Microelectronics (Singapore), and Institute for Infocomm Research (Singapore). He has been the project leader of 12 successfully delivered projects in digital multimedia technology development. He also serves as the Lab Head, Visual Processing, and then the Acting Department Manager, Media Processing, in Institute for Infocomm Research. His areas of expertise include perception-inspired signal modeling, perceptual multimedia quality evaluation, video compression, image processing & analysis. He holds seven patents, wrote 6 book chapters, authored a book, edited a book, published over 240 refereed papers in international journals and conferences, and made more than ten contributions to international standardization. He is a Chartered Engineer, a Fellow of IET, and an Honorary Fellow of Singapore Institute of Engineering Technologists. He believes that good theory is practical so has kept a balance of academic research and industrial deployment throughout his working life.

The research topics of our Lab include:

Perceptual Signal Processing:

Signal quality evaluation plays a central role in shaping almost all signal processing algorithms and systems, as well as their implementation, optimization and testing. Since the human (with both vision and hearing) is the ultimate receiver of the vast majority of signals (being natural or computer generated) after acquisition, processing and transmission, incorporating proper human perception characteristics not only makes built systems user-oriented but also enables resource savings (i.e., turning imperfectness of the human perception into advantages in design). The resultant perceptual metrics are expected to fill a gap in most existing signal processing related products and services; namely, a non-perception-based criterion used in engineering design versus devices/services for the human to consume. This is an exciting, inter-disciplinary research area since it enables user-oriented designs and further system performance improvement. We need to incorporate the latest relevant findings in physiology, psychology and perception science into computational models, and to verify such models with psychophysical data.

Video coding:

Great achievement has been made in the area of video coding during the past two decades with the joint effort of academia and industries (resulting in the current ITU/MPEG/JPEG standards and all related products and services launched). In our research, we go back to the basics, to perform a systematic investigation on video coders, and to devise new video coding methods to address the major difficulties in further improving the compression ratio, to meet the requirements for ubiquity and affordability for multimedia signal representation and communication. Pre-processing, post-processing, adaptation and reconstruction are also important to enhance the received coding quality. It is also noted that videos increasingly contain animations and scenes generated by computers have different characteristics.

Besides, our research also concerns image retrieval, image watermarking with perceptual cues, super-resolution reconstruction from video, face recognition, error resilience for images, visual object segmentation, fast/hardware implementation of visual processing algorithms, signal processing in medical applications and so on.

WSLin@ntu.edu.sg