[visionlist] PhD studentship at Univ. of East Anglia - deadline extension

[Mackiewicz Michal Dr (CMP)]

Apologies for the repeated post, but we would like to inform the prospective applicants about the deadline extension.

Visually Meaningful Image Fusion: Mapping Multispectral Image Data to Colour

School: Computing Sciences

Supervisor(s): Professor Graham Finlayson, Dr Barry Theobald

Application Deadline: June 30th 2011 

Funding is available for UK/EU students. Funding awarded for this project will cover tuition fees and stipend for UK students. EU students may be eligible for full funding, or tuition fees only, depending on the funding source. International students will not be eligible for this funding however they are still welcome to apply for the project but would have to find alternative funding. 

Project Description: 

Imaging started with black and white photography about 200 years ago. Then colour photographic technology followed 50 years later. The modern analogues of photos are, of course, the RGB images found in their billions in home collections and on the internet. More recently, it has been possible to take images not just of the visible scene but also of parts of the electro-magnetic spectrum not visible to the naked eye. Often, there are important features in these images which are not visible to us: e.g. haze often disappears in infra red images[1]. Now it is not uncommon for images to have 10s or even 100s of measurements per pixel but, of course, we only have 3 sensors in our eye to view these images. Conventionally, if you have a 300 channel satellite image you need to look at 300 individual black and white images to be sure you have analysed all the information available in the scene (a time consuming and laborious process). At the University of East Anglia we have developed a novel method of mapping N-dimensional data to an equivalent greyscale image[2]. Significantly, our greyscale image is preferred in some applications. We are now interested in extending our work to colour and have some preliminary research results[3]. The successful applicant will work directly with Prof Finlayson on the image fusion problem. This project takes place in the context of the colour group. This group currently comprises two post-doctoral research students and 5 PhD students. Over the last 10 years, the colour group has graduated 12 PhD students who have gone on to work in universities (e.g. EPFL, Switzerland and Trondheim, Norway) and in companies (including, Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Canon and Foveon). 

References:  

[1] L. Schaul, C. Fredembach and S. Süsstrunk, ``Color Image Dehazing using the Near-Infrared,'' Proc. IEEE International Conference on Image Processing, 2009.
[2] D. Connah, G.D. Finlayson and M. Bloj, ``Seeing Beyond Luminance: A Psychophysical Comparison of Techniques for Converting Colour Images to Greyscale.'' of the 15th Color Imaging Conference., 336-340, 2007
[3] M. S. Drew and G. D. Finlayson,``Realistic Colorization via the Structure Tensor'', International Conference on Image Processing, ICIP08, San Diego, CA, October 12-15, 2008.
Funding Status:
Directly Funded Project (UK Students Only) 
Directly Funded Project (European Students Only) 

Acceptable First Degree: Computer Science, mathematics, Physics Psychology. The student should have a solid grounding in basic mathematics and some programming experience