1. For more information: Prof. Hanseok Ko (hsko@korea.ac.kr, office: 3290-3239) Jee-Eun Lee (bluelee@ispl.korea.ac.kr, office: 3290-3670) When: Friday, March 2 nd, 2:00 PM Where: Room 113, Engineering Bldg. Speaker: Dr. Minh N. Do Assistant Professor Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Abstract Efficient representation of visual information lies at the foundation of many image and video processing tasks, including compression, filtering, reconstruction, and feature extraction. Efficiency of a representation means the power to capture significant information of an object of interest in a small description. For practical applications, this representation has to be realized by structured transforms and fast algorithms. In this talk, after demonstrating that the commonly used separable wavelet transforms are inadequate for processing pictorial information, I will present our recent constructions of "true" multidimensional representations that can capture the geometric structures that are typically the dominant feature in images and multidimensional data. Our approach is based on the development of directional and multiresolution expansions using non-separable filter banks. The resulting image expansion is composed of contour segments, and thus is named contourlets. More generally, we constructed the surfacelet transform that can efficiently capture and represent surface-like singularities in multidimensional data. Experiments with real images and videos indicate the potential of contourlets and surfacelets in several applications. Furthermore, by utilizing ideas from harmonic analysis, visual perception, computer vision, and signal processing, we look for a new fruitful interaction between these fields. This is a joint work with Arthur Cunha, Yue Lu, Duncan Po, Martin Vetterli, and Jianping Zhou. Biography Minh N. Do was born in Thanh Hoa, Vietnam, in 1974. He received the B.Eng. degree in computer engineering (with first class honors) from the University of Canberra, Australia, in 1997, and the Dr.Sci. degree in communication systems from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, in 2001. Since 2002, he has been an Assistant Professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a Research Assistant Professor with the Coordinated Science Laboratory and the Beckman Institute, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests include image and multidimensional signal processing, wavelets, imaging, multiscale geometric analysis, and visual information representation. He received a Silver Medal from the 32nd International Mathematical Olympiad in Sweden (1991), a University Medal from the University of Canberra (1997), the best doctoral thesis award from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (2001), and a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation (2003). He coauthored on two papers (with Arthur L. da Cunha and Ha T. Nguyen) that received Best Student Paper Awards at the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (2005), and a paper (with Yue Lu) that received a Most Innovative Paper Award at the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (2006). He was named a Beckman Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study, University of Illinois, in 2006. He is an Associate Editor (for Image & Video Coding) of the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing. Colloquium Series Sponsored by IITA Visiting Scholar Program Research Institute of Semiconductor & Technology Title: Beyond Wavelets Multiscale Geometric Representations