January 16, 2011
School of Engineering, Coimbatore
Even as Eastern Australia continues to remain inundated by unprecedented floods, a visitor from Western Australia’s largest university, Curtin, visited Amrita’s Coimbatore campus recently, in pursuit of collaboration that could provide solutions to global societal problems.
As Distinguished Professor at the Australian university, Dr. Svetha Venkatesh heads the Institute for Multi-Sensor Processing and Content Analysis. At Amrita, she interacted with graduate students of the department of Computer Science and Engineering, currently pursuing their M.Tech. in Computer Virtual Image Processing.
The students introduced themselves, and shared their research interests and ongoing projects.
Highly impressed with the nature of the work being done, Dr. Svetha stated, “I am very happy to hear from such an enthusiastic group of students, who are working on real-time research problems as a part of their masters’ theses.”
Providing insights about her university, Dr. Svetha highlighted ongoing research projects at her Institute. “We focus on research in areas such as pattern recognition, automated video summarization and large-scale image processing applications,” she stated.
Pointing out that any theoretical research should have an application to prove its usefulness, she answered student questions.
Gopu Darshan, second-year student of M.Tech. wanted to know more about key frames selection during the video summarization process.
“Audio peaks are examined and the corresponding frames are extracted,” Dr. Sevtha answered.
“The interactive session was very useful,” stated A. Baskar, Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering. “We learned that optical flow will provide good results when extracting from a real video.”
Dr. Svetha also toured the research facility at the Center for Computational Engineering and Networking. There were discussions to engage in joint research and respond to recent DST calls for Indo-Australian proposals.
Meeting with the Vice Chancellor, Dr. P. Venkat Rankan and other key administrators, Dr. Svetha discussed steps towards the signing of a formal MoU between Amrita and Curtin University.
