The Amrita-Cognizant Innovation Lab was recently inaugurated at the Coimbatore campus by Prof. C. Parameswaran, Director, Corporate and Industry Relations, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham and Mr. Vishnu Potty, Head, Cognizant Technologies Solutions (CTS) in Coimbatore.

The well-equipped lab will support the work of students pursuing their MTech degree in Computer Vision and Image Processing as well as BTech students undertaking projects in these areas.

It was a proposal made by the Department of Computer Science and Engineering on that campus that was supported by the US-based CTS, operating successfully in India, that led to the setup of the lab.

With two divisions for Image Processing and Networking respectively, the lab features a Digital Evaluation Module to enable developers build digital video applications effortlessly and a Machine Vision System to acquire and process images.

In addition, there are robotic kits to empower users to create affordable mobile robot platforms.

A wireless day/night surveillance camera and another wireless pan/tilt surveillance camera will help provide students the tools needed to analyze and build surveillance and tracking based applications.

Other image and video processing and acquisition devices like a beagle board, a leopard board, AMD HD6670 graphics card, NVIDIA GT 240 graphics card and a kinect are also included.

A Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) for Cognitive Radio Development, a tool for rapid prototyping and deployment of software radios are provided.

Fund was received from Cognizant for all these devices, applications, modules and kits.

Students have already begun putting the new lab to good use. Some of their projects now ongoing in the lab include Face Detection Algorithms implemented on the beagle board platform using OpenCV, Hand Gesture Recognition and Movement of Robot implemented on I-Robot using MATLAB and Roomba development toolkit, Optical Character Recognition implemented on NI- Vision system using LabVIEW and finally Motion Tracking in Video implemented on datasets captured from TP-Link IP camera using OpenCV.

“The lab is currently being used for student projects only. We are planning to organize workshops using the facilities available in the lab, so that it can be extended for further research activities,” explained Dr. R. Karthi, Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering.

“In the lab, students receive exposure to several industrial and open source hardware kits for networking, image and video processing. Students learn about open source software tools such as Python, OpenCL, OpenCV, VTK / ITK and OpenGL,” she added.

Amrita’s value-based education is the main reason Cognizant returns to Amrita, year after year, to recruit in large numbers. May the Amrita Cognizant Innovation Lab spawn projects that help solve problems of humanity.

September 26, 2012
School of Engineering, Coimbatore