2013 Mr Armin and Mrs Lillian Kitchell Undergraduate Research Awards

CSE UG students XU Zhinan and ZHANG Zhijun respectively won the 3rd place and became a finalist in the 2013 Mr Armin and Mrs Lillian Kitchell Undergraduate Research Award Competition.

Zhinan was awarded the 3rd place with his project "Optimization-based Image Decolorization" supervised by Prof Chiew-lan Tai. The conversions from color image to grayscale are indispensable in image processing considering the essential role played by grayscale images in image preprocessing and grayscale printing. However, salient features of color image often disappear in the grayscale result due to some avoidable or unavoidable loss of information in the conversion. This paper presents three robust and efficient color-to-grayscale algorithms based on the algorithm presented by Kim et al. Compared to the original work which considers only the local differences, Zhinan takes the global differences into account. Specifically, he devises three different methods that consider statistics from the image in CIE Lch, in RGB color spaces and consider differences of random chosen pixel by Gaussian pairing.

With the project "RFID Noise Identification Using Classification" supervised by Prof Wilfred Ng, Zhijun entered the final round of the competition. The project is about noise identification in radio-frequency identification technology. It improves and utilizes machine learning techniques to perform automatical noise identification using RFID readings. It runs the algorithm using various parameters to achieve good performance. A demonstration application for RFID professionals is also developed to utilize the algorithm.

The award presentation ceremony was held on 23 April 2013 at HKUST.

Group Photo at the Award Presentation Ceremony