Digital Signal Processing Seminar

Image diffusion encompasses a broad class of adaptive image processing techniques based on partial differential equations. The image diffusion techniques are applicable to the image enhancement, feature extraction, scale-space generation, image segmentation and image restoration problems. This talk explores the benefits and shortcomings of current anisotropic diffusion solutions and introduces recent innovations in the diffusion area. Specific advances in the theory include robust morphological diffusion coefficients, a diffusion technique that converges to locally monotonic root signals, extensions to multispectral imagery, multi-resolution (pyramidal) approaches, multigrid solutions and optimization techniques for ill-posed (nonconvex) image restoration problems. Applications to remote sensing, to video tracking and to automated inspection are presented. Other applications in the biomedical and telecommunications areas are discussed.

Scott T. Acton received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Virginia Tech in 1988, the M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 1990 and 1993, respectively. He has worked in industry for AT&T, the MITRE Corporation and Motorola, Inc. Currently, Dr. Acton is an Associate Professor in the School of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Oklahoma State University where he directs the Oklahoma Imaging Laboratory. The laboratory is sponsored by several organizations including the Army Research Office (ARO), NASA and Lucent Technologies.

Dr. Acton is the winner of the 1996 Eta Kappa Nu Outstanding Young Electrical Engineer Award, a national award that has been given annually since 1936. At OSU, he has been selected as the 1997 Halliburton Outstanding Young Faculty Member. He serves as Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing and is an active participant in the IEEE, ASEE, SPIE and Eta Kappa Nu. His research interests include multiscale image representations, diffusion algorithms, image morphology, and image restoration.

A list of digital signal processing seminars is available at from the ECE department Web pages under "Seminars". The Web address for the digital signal processing seminars is http://anchovy.ece.utexas.edu/seminars