The Signal Processing Society (SPS) of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has selected Skoltech Assistant Professor Stamatios Lefkimmiatis as the winner of its highly prestigious Best Paper Award, in recognition of his influential publication on image processing.

The IEEE is the world’s largest association of technical professionals, with more than 420,000 members in over 160 countries around the world. Every five years, the honor is given to the authors of the five top papers published in IEEE SPS publications during that period.

In fields ranging from digital photography to medical imaging, biomicroscopy to astronomical imaging, practitioners grapple with image processing problems.

Key areas of concern include:

• Image denoising (the removal of noise – i.e. light or dark disturbances or pixilation – from an image);
• Super-resolution (increasing the resolution of an image in order to distinguish small details);
• Image deblurring (clarifying blurry images); and
• Inpainting (filling missing information into an image, i.e. when a portion of an old photograph has been destroyed). 

Lafkimmiatis has focused his efforts on designing a novel family of regularization functionals that can be employed to efficiently solve large-scale image reconstruction problems, including in all four of the key areas listed above.

His method provides a potential alternative to the very popular total-variation (TV) functional, which has found numerous applications in image processing and computer vision.

“The functionals that I have introduced rely on the Hessian operator, a second-order differential operator, which is more appropriate than the TV functional for many image processing applications since it can better model the intensity variations of natural and biomedical images,” said Lefkimmiatis.

The Awards Ceremony will take place at the Opening Ceremony of the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing which will take place in Canada in April 2018.

Contact information:
Skoltech Communications
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