Year in Review: 2003

The Image Science Group has had a busy and productive year. The group now consists of a resident computer graphics expert and animator, Lorie Loeb, four Ph.D. students (Kimo Johnson, Siwei Lyu, Alin Popescu, and Hai Sun), and three undergraduates (Joe Pechter, Will Pechter, and Tim Williamson).

Joe, Will and Tim are all primarily working with Lorie on some exciting new projects at the crossroads of graphics, animation, and vision. The main emphasis of the rest of the group is in Digital Forensics and Medical Imaging, with a smattering of other projects in a variety of areas. As usual, more details can be found at www.cs.dartmouth.edu/farid.

The lab recently purchased an 18 node (36 processor) Linux cluster - each processor is a 3.06GHz Xeon chip with 2GB of memory. The cluster is helping us with some heavy computational jobs consisting of analyzing tens of thousands of images and audio files.

Sudikoff is building an extension to help the department with our space shortage. We hope, by next summer, to move into a new 1000+ sq. ft. lab (more than twice the size of our current space). And, don't worry, I've already ordered the black paint.

Senthil Periaswamy defended his thesis this year (General-Purpose Medical Image Registration), and is currently at Siemens, located outside of Philadelphia. It was hard to see Senthil leave, but he is doing some exciting new work at Siemens. Below are two papers describing most of his thesis work:

S. Periaswamy and H. Farid
Elastic Registration in the Presence of Intensity Variations
IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, 22(7):865-874, 2003.

S. Periaswamy and H. Farid
Elastic Registration with Partial Data
Second International Workshop on Biomedical Image Registration, Philadelphia, PA, 2003.

Siwei Lyu has been doing some outstanding work in modeling and understanding the statistics of natural images, and using those models in several different digital forensic settings. Here are some of the most recent papers describing this work:

S. Lyu and H. Farid
How Realistic is Photorealistic?
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2004

S. Lyu and H. Farid
Steganalysis Using Color Wavelet Statistics and One-Class Support Vector Machines
SPIE Symposium on Electronic Imaging, San Jose, CA, 2004.

H. Farid and S. Lyu
Higher-order Wavelet Statistics and their Application to Digital Forensics
IEEE Workshop on Statistical Analysis in Computer Vision (in conjunction with CVPR), Madison, Wisconsin, 2003

Alin Popescu will be proposing his Ph.D. thesis early in 2004. Alin has been doing some pioneering work in the area of digital forensics, with an emphasis in detecting local and specific forms of digital tampering. Here are some recent papers, not yet on the web page, but should be there shortly:

A.C. Popescu and H. Farid
Statistical Tools for Digital Forensics
6th International Workshop on Information Hiding, 2004

A.C. Popescu and H. Farid
Exposing Digital Forgeries by Traces of Re-sampling
IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, 2004

Hai Sun has been doing some spectacular work in the area of image-guided neurosurgery. Hai is an MD/Ph.D. student and is co-advised with Keith Paulsen at Thayer. Hai has solved some very hard problems to build a near real-time system for overlaying pre-operative MR data with a surgeon's microscope view. Hai will be defending his thesis next year. Below are some recent papers describing his work from both the clinical and technical sides:

H. Sun, D.W. Roberts, H. Farid, Z. Wu, A. Hartov, and K.D. Paulsen
Cortical Surface Tracking Using a Stereoscopic Operating Microscope
Neurosurgery, 2004

H. Sun, H. Farid, D.W. Roberts, K. Rick, A. Hartov, and K.D. Paulsen
A Non-Contacting 3-D Digitizer for Use in Image-Guided Neurosurgery
Steroetactic and Functional Neurosurgery, 2003

H. Sun, H. Farid, K. Rick, A. Hartov, D.W. Roberts, and K.D. Paulsen
Estimating Cortical Surface Motion Using Stereopsis for Brain Deformation Models
Medical Image Computing & Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI), Montreal, Canada, 2003

Jethro Rothe-Kushel graduated and is currently in Mexico City working on a series of short films based on the theme of Mexican rituals. Jethro, for those of you who have not had the pleasure to meet him, is a remarkable young man, and I expect that we will all be seeing some great things from him in the years to come.

And finally, after 8 years of work, I and a co-author have completed a paper that describes the (mathematically) proper way to compute derivatives of discrete images/volumes/etc of arbitrary orders. This was a long fought battle, with many dead-ends, and frustrating starts and finishes. We had, on many occasions, given up hope that a solution was possible, but earlier this year we had several break-throughs and were happy to see the paper accepted:

H. Farid and E.P. Simoncelli
Differentiation of Discrete Multi-Dimensional Signals
IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 2004

All of the above mentioned papers (and more) are available at:

www.cs.dartmouth.edu/farid/publications