In the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, I am intent to engage in research work
of image processing during my graduate studies.
With a wish to build a solid foundation for my future research and study, I was fully devoted to
my academic training during my undergraduate time in Beijing University of Aeronautics and
Astronautics. I gained A in Electronic Practice and College Physics, my GPA of math related
courses is 3.63/4.0. In Digital Signal Processing, my score 92 ranked in the top two percent of most
140 students. In another course Digital Image Processing, I not only master some techniques such
as gral level histogram and spatial details for image segmentation, but also use the techniques to
discriminate objects from the background in a picture. Four years of undergraduate studies had
me will trained in a wide range of disciplines, and my good academic performance encouraged
me to pursue a PhD degree.
What makes me stands out from the rest is my innovative thinking and learn ability. I am not a
passive notes-taker and a follower in study. On the contrary, I always keep an eye on the
application of theories and methods introduced in class. For example, after the course Digital
Image Processing, I conducted a research about license plate recognition. Confines of declining
angles and definition in the emendation as well as the effection of plate frame, rivet and space
mark to the extraction are the key problems to license plate recognition. So I pick an improved
Harris coner detection algorithm utilizaing maximums and template-match. With the algorithm,
the inner-corners can be extracted simply and exactly, not affected by the declining angels. On
the basic of the inner-corners, the plate is emendated without frame and the characters are
located at the center of the image, which makes it easy to extract the character accrurately as a
whole. As a result, more than 50% license plates can be recongized correctly. This is encouraging
for me to do some further research in this area.
Anxious to find out what “scientific research” really means, I began doing laboratory research as
early as from the third year. First at Key Laboratory of Satellite Navigation, my work concentrated
on designing self-location system and algorithms for wireless sensor network. Generally speaking,
works during this period were fragmentary, but they have given me sufficent experience on C++
and MATLAB, which laid a solid foundation for my future research.
Later, to pursue my interest, I applied to join Key Labortory of Digital Signal Processing to conduct
a research project about visual tracking, aiming to detect and track moving objects though a
sequence of images. After divided the moving target from the background, I linked a sequence of
object blobs together across image frames in order to determine the identity and location of an
object at different point in an image sequence. To achieve this, I picked the method that
describeed each object blob by a set of state, such as its position, velocity and size, and tracking
the object’s true position was done by tracking its state using particle filter, as the particle filter’s
ability of maintaining multi-modal distribution of the state and robustness to noise while Kalman
filter is limited. This uses information from the current observation and the previous object state
to create an estimate of the object’s new state. However, particle degeneracy is one of the main
problems when particle filters are applied. I chose re-sampling as the solution for this problem to
propagating and updating these samples. When combining this estimate with additional
information of its state, tracking accuracy can be overall improved. This project deepened my
interest in image processing, as my research outcome may affect people’s daily life.
My research plan:
I intend to concentrate on the following sub-field of image processing: (1) Three-dimensional
image reconstruction; (2) digital watermark; (3) video object modeling and tracking. As I always
keep an eye on the application of theories and methods, I also want to do some research related
to medical image, which is the popular topic currently. My reason to pursue the graduate
program in University of Rochester is mainly out of my great interest in Professor Gaurav
Sharma’s work. I have read several papers from him, and find that my background seems
perfectly fit his research interest.
I know I have the intelligence, ability and determination to achieve success in this field. I only
need the opportunity. My research experience combined with my education background and
research plan makes me well suited accept the challenges in this field.