ECE professor, student win second best paper award

10/3/2007 Bridget Maiellaro, ECE Illinois

Graduate student Yue Lu was recently granted the IBM Student Paper Award at the 2007 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing. The paper, co-written by ECE Professor Minh Do, is entitled "Finding optimal integral sampling lattices for a given frequency support in multidimensions."

Written by Bridget Maiellaro, ECE Illinois

Grad student Yue Lu and ECE Professor Minh Do recently received a second best paper award for their work.
Grad student Yue Lu and ECE Professor Minh Do recently received a second best paper award for their work.

Graduate student Yue Lu was recently granted the IBM Student Paper Award at the 2007 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing. The paper, co-written by ECE Minh N Do, is entitled "Finding optimal integral sampling lattices for a given frequency support in multidimensions."

"The thing that’s truly exciting about this is that we just simply added onto a string of simply wonderful, highly regarded accomplishments from the people of the University of Illinois," Do said.

Lu and Do attended the international conference, which was held Sept. 16 through Sept. 19 in San Antonio, Texas, and presented their paper, which discusses how to find the best way to sample a signal, to the forum.

"The conference [was] a very good place for us to present our paper and get feedback from other people," Lu said. "It’s nice to let people know about your work, and it’s very important to get other people’s opinion and to see the connections with the work. You could maybe point out a connection that is not very obvious, but important. Also the conference is a good way to network with other researchers, other professors, or students."

Lu and Do, who have worked together since Lu arrived at the University five years ago, said they have been researching the topic for about a year. The ongoing research of this work is also in collaboration with mathematics professor Richard Laugesen. Do said that a simple way to understand their research in sampling is to imagine how to pack oranges into a box in the most efficient way.

"This research is going to be important since now we have a lot more high dimensional data, including images, videos, 4D medical data, and spectral data, and one of the fundamental questions is how to find the most efficient way to sample these data sets," Do added. "Sampling is the cornerstone of signal processing. I often say our entire digital revolution really depends on this fundamental operation."

Lu and Do submitted their paper in January and were notified that they had won in mid-August. It was one of the four papers selected to receive this award.

Prior to this recognition, Lu and Do were also granted the "Most Innovative Award" for their paper entitled, "A new contourlet transform with sharp frequency localization" at last year's IEEE International Conference on Image Processing held in Atlanta.

Lu, who is graduating this month, will be working at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland. He believes that the job will be a good step towards his ultimate goal of becoming a professor.


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This story was published October 3, 2007.