About Us

Our research philosophy is to do problem-driven research in multimedia systems which explore the development of novel algorithms and techniques. There are two main themes of our research work: content-based multimedia information processing and multimedia information security. Both are systems research areas which have fundamental conceptual issues arising out of real-world problems. So their flavor is a blend of both basic and applied research.
The long-term goal of this research program is to develop fundamental techniques, algorithms and applications which can allow multimedia data to be utilized with as much ease as text data can be on today's computers. The medium-term aim of this research is to develop techniques for semantic content-based processing of image, video and audio, to provide intuitive access and retrieval to image, video and audio information, and to provide tools for processing, analyzing & synthesizing images, video and audio.

In the short term, this research will have a major impact on many areas such as consumer electronics, web-based services, social media, video surveillance and media security & privacy. The long-term impact will be on the advancement of the state of understanding of sensory information processing.

The long-term research foci are as follows:

  1. To employ rigorous mathematical techniques for multimedia content processing. The eventual goal is to contribute to the theoretical foundations of multimedia systems.

    1. To develop adaptive techniques based on control-theoretic and decision-theoretic foundations to build autonomous multimedia systems. This is the foundational work for cyber-physical systems.

    2. To study the interplay of economics and finance with computer science with respect to the problems of multimedia fusion, multimedia surveillance, and computational advertisement.

    3. To investigate the phenomenon of saliency and attention in order to build better multimedia systems.

    4. To explore the interaction of media and sensors in social networks.

  2. To explore fully the area of computational media aesthetics by employing ideas from cinema theory and music theory into signal processing.

    1. To explore issues and problems arising out of future digital television system as well as the proliferation of digital media capture devices. This considers capture, analysis, synthesis and re-purposing of user-generated content especially by amateur home users.

  3. To explore the many unobvious links between cryptography and multimedia to build secure multimedia systems.

    1. To research into preserving security and privacy properties of media against format transcoding as well as cross-modal interactions.

    2. To develop effective techniques for digital management of rights for multimedia content including images, video, audio and electronic documents.

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