By: Xiang "Sean" Zhou, PhD,
Integrated Data Systems Department, Siemens Corporate Research
Time: 1:00 PM, Thursday, March 31st, 2005.
Place: Room 202, ECE Center, New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), Newark NJ. Directions

Abstract

In this talk, the lecturer will introduce the work at Siemens Corporate Research in the areas of robust and database-guided approaches to object/shape inference and tracking, with applications to medical image analysis and computer aided diagnosis support. The current research efforts span the fields of computer vision, pattern recognition, information retrieval, and machine learning. In particular, the lecturer will discuss in detail a framework for robust shape inference and tracking, exploiting annotated databases, heteroscedastic uncertainties or noise from measurement, system dynamics, and a subspace shape model. The framework is applied for tracking in echocardiograms where the motion estimation errors are heteroscedastic in nature, each heart has a distinct shape, and the relative motions of epicardial and endocardial borders reveal crucial diagnostic features. The proposed method significantly outperforms the existing shape-space-constrained tracking algorithms, with very robust performance even on the most challenging cases.

Biography

Dr. Xiang “Sean” Zhou received his PhD degree in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (UIUC) in 2002. Previously, he received the bachelor's degree in automation and in economics and management (minor) and studied economics for two years in a PhD program at Tsinghua University, China.

Since 2002, he has been with Siemens Corporate Research in Princeton, New Jersey, where he is now a project manager for the Robust Analysis and Content Retrieval group. His research interests include computer vision, machine learning, object detection, tracking, and recognition, multimedia analysis, representation, understanding, and retrieval. Dr. Zhou is an associated editor for Pattern Analysis and Applications, and was the program co-chair for the 2003 International Conference on Image and Video Retrieval. He is the principle author of the book Exploration of Visual Data (Kluwer 2003). He publishes in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, IEEE Multimedia, Optical Engineering, ACM Multimedia Systems Journal, etc., and leading international research and medical conferences.

Dr. Zhou was the recipient of eight scholarships and awards from Tsinghua University from 1988 to 1995. In 2001, he received the M.E. Van Valkenburg Fellowship Award, an award given to one or two PhD students in the ECE department of UIUC each year "for demonstrated excellence in research in the areas of circuits, systems, or computers."