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Dr. Rabab Kreidieh Ward |
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Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering |
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FRSC , FIEEE , FCAE , FEIC |
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Biography
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Dr. Rabab K.
Ward is a Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering
Department at the University of British Columbia ( UBC), Canada. She is
presently appointed in the Office of the Vice-President Research Office
as the natural sciences and engineering research coordinator for UBC.
She ensures that initiatives are developed to support research and
scholarship in engineering and the natural sciences and that the
relevant information is disseminated .
She is Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the Institute of
Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the Canadian Academy of Engineers
and the Engineering Institute of Canada. She has received the Career
Achievement Award of CUFA, BC, the organization representing all
professors and academic staff at BC's doctoral universities (2011), UBC
Engineering Co-op Faculty Member of the Year Award (2010), the IEEE
Signal Processing Society top award "The Society Award" (2008), the YWCA
Woman of Distinction Award (2008), British
Columbia's top engineering award "The RA McLachlan Memorial Award"
(2006) and UBC Killam Research Prize (1998).
Dr Ward's research interests are
mainly in the areas of signal, image and video processing. She has made
contributions in the areas of signal detection, image encoding,
compression, recognition, restoration and enhancement, and their
applications to cable TV, HDTV, medical images, infant cry signals and
brain computer interfaces . She has published around 130 refereed
journal papers, 260 refereed conference articles and holds six patents
related to cable television picture monitoring, measurement and noise
reduction. Applications of her work have been transferred to U.S. and
Canadian industries. She is the inventor of the non-intrusive
measurement methods for cable TV video impairments (licensed to
Hewlett-Packard) and co-inventor of a non-interfering video system for
measuring size and biomass of fish in cages and Tanks (licensed to J. B.
Thompson and Associates).
She was the Vice President of the IEEE
Signal Processing Society (2003 - 2005) and a member of the Society's
Board of Governors( 2003-2995 and 2008-1010). She was the General Chair
of the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing 2000, the Vice
Chair of the IEEE International Symposium on Circuits & Systems 2004,
chair of the IEEE Symposium on Signal Processing and Information
Technology and is the co-chair of ICASSP 2013.
She was the Principal Investigator of the $22.2 million CFI/BCKDF award
which resulted in a new building at UBC that houses the most modern
equipment in all areas related to human centered technologies .
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You can download my CV
here.
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Current Research Projects
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Developing asynchronous Brain Computer Interface systems:
The ultimate aim is to use the EEG as a direct communication channel from
the brain of a person with severe motor disabilities to the real world.
This is achieved by analyzing a person's EEG signal to detect whether or
not it contains an activity relating to the person's intention to control
his/her environment or a device.
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Fast
Magnetic Resonance Imaging: Magnetic Resonance
Imaging (MRI) is a versatile medical imaging modality. It can produce very
high quality images without any biological side-effects. However it is a
slow imaging modality. There has been physics (hardware) based and signal
processing (software) based acceleration techniques to speed-up MR
acquisition times. Our research is driven by recent advances in Compressed
Sensing. We intend to speed-up data acquisition times, by collecting less
data (than required by traditional MRI techniques) and reconstructing the
image by using smart Compressed Sensing algorithms. In particular we focus
on the following areas on MR Imaging:
o Single slice MR imaging from single and multiple K-space scans.
o Quantitative MR imaging.
o Combining signal processing and physics based techniques for parallel
MRI.
o Dynamic MRI.
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Content based multimedia fingerprinting: This
project addresses copy detection and copyright protection in multimedia
sharing websites. The aim is to develop algorithms that can identify
whether a query video (or part of it) has been copied form an existing
video in a large database of videos . The approach used is called
fingerprinting . Fingerprinting extracts from a video, compact signatures
that should uniquely identify this video or any distorted versions
of it. The main two challenges in video fingerprinting are the design of
the fingerprinting algorithm and the search algorithm that can identify a
certain fingerprint in a huge database of fingerprints in a correct and
fast fashion .
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Information hiding and quality monitoring using
watermarking: Data hiding is usually used in
secret communication between two parties. Towards this aim, a binary
secret message is imperceptibly inserted into the content. For example,
this message could be the identification number of the content owner. At
the receiver side, the hidden information should be extracted as
accurately as possible. Watermarking has also been adopted as a technique
to provide a blind measure of the quality of service (QoS) in multimedia
communications. In such applications, the watermark is embedded into the
original image at the transmitter side. The image quality is estimated at
the receiver side by extracting the watermark from the received image and
comparing it with the original watermark.
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Human activity recognition
in real videos: This project aims at recognizing human
action under occlusion, scale and viewpoint changes. The task is highly
challenging as we work on real world videos collected from Youtube,
movies, TV broadcasts etc.
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Digital image
interpolation:
Digital image interpolation is also known as image enlargement /reduction
has many application in the advertising industry, digital cameras, video
compression etc. Content-adaptive and Wavelet-based image interpolation
techniques are developed. Efforts are also directed to finding efficient
methods for edge enhancement, removing edge zigzagging and solving the
loss of contrast after image enlargement.
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Image-based face
recognition invariant to pose, illumination, and facial expression
variations: The
approaches are based on wavelet transform and principal component analysis
to normalize illumination variation and to extract more salient features
to facilitate the face recognition task.
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Reversible integer-to-integer wavelet/subband transforms
in the context of JPEG-2000 standardization effort.
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Selected Recent Publications
For the complete
list of publications, please refer to my
publication list.
Journal Papers
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Nezhadarya E., and Ward, R. K., ”A New Approach to
Robust Gradient Estimation in Color Images”, IEEE Trans. Image
Processing, (accepted).
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Majumdar, A., and Ward, R. K., “Accelerating
Multi-echo T2 Weighted MR Imaging: Analysis Prior Group Sparse
Optimization”, Journal of Magnetic Resonance, (accepted).
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Majumdar, A., and Ward, R. K., “An
Algorithm for Sparse MRI Reconstruction by Schatten p-norm
Minimization”, Elsevier Magnetic Resonance Imaging (accepted).
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Malekesmaeili, M., Fatourechi, M.,
and Ward, R. K. “Design of a Robust, Fast, and Secure Video Copy
Detection System”, IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and
Security, (accepted).
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Majumdar, A., and Ward, R. K.,
“Increasing energy efficiency in sensor networks: Blue noise sampling
and non-convex matrix completion”, International Journal of Sensor
Networks (accepted).
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Mai, Z., Mansour, H., Mantiuk, R.,
Nasiopoulos, P., Ward, R. K., and Heidrich W., "Optimizing a Tone
Curve for Backward-Compatible High Dynamic Range Image/Video
Compression," IEEE Trans. Image Processing, August 2009,
(accepted).
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Majumdar, A., and Ward, R. K.,
“Robust Classifiers for Data Reduced via Random Projections”, IEEE
Trans. Systems, Man and Cybernetics Part: B (in print)..
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Du, S., and Ward, R.K., “Adaptive
Region-Based Image Enhancement Method for Robust Face Recognition
under Variable Illumination Conditions”, IEEE Trans. Circuits and
Systems for Video Technology, vol. 20, no. 9, pp. 1165-1175, Sept
2010.
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Ersahin,
K., Cumming, I. G., and Ward., R. K., "Segmentation and Classification
of Polarimetric SAR Data Using Spectral Graph Partitioning", IEEE
Trans. Geoscience and Remote Sensing, Vol. 48, Issue 1, Part: 1,
pp. 164 – 174, Jan 2010..
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Du,
S., and Ward, R.K., “Improved Face Representation by Non-Uniform
Multi-Level Selection of Gabor Convolution Features”, IEEE
Trans. Systems, Man and Cybernetics, Part B,
Vol 39, Issue 6, Dec 2009 pp. 1408 - 1419.,
Dec 2009.
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Conference Papers
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E. Nezhadarya, Z. J. Wnag and Rabab K. Ward, "A New Data Hiding Method
Using Angle Quantization Index Modulation In Gradient Domain", IEEE
Int. Conf. on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP),
Prague, Czech, May 2011 (accepted).
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Guha, T. and Ward, R. , “Action Recognition by Learning Class-specific
Overcomplete Dictionaries”, IEEE Int. Conf. on Automatic Face and
Gesture Recognition (FG), Santa Barbara, CA, March 2011 (accepted).
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Majumdar A., and R. K. Ward,
"Under-determined Non-Cartesian MR Reconstruction", MICCAI,
pp. 513-520, Beijing, China, Sep 2010.
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Yong X., Ward, R. K. and Birch, G. E.,
"A self-paced brain computer interface (BCI) based point-and-click
system", BCI Meeting, Asilomar, Calif, June 2010.
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Faradji, F., Ward, R. K., and Birch, G.
E., "A Simple Approach to Find the Best Wavelet Basis in Classification
Problems," ICPR, pp. 641-644, Turkey, August 2010.
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Sun, N., Mansour, H., and Ward,
R.K., “HDR Image Construction From Multi-Exposed Stereo LDR Images”,
IEEE Inter Conf. on Image Processing,
ICIP, Hong Kong, Sep 2010.
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Mai, Z., Mansour, H., Nasiopoulos, P.,
and Ward, R. K., "Visually-Favorable Tone-Mapping with High compression
Performance," IEEE Inter Conf. on Image Processing 2010 (ICIP),
Hong Kong, Sep 2010.
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Nezhadarya, E., Wang Z., J., and Ward,
R., K., “ Watermark Survival Chance (WSC) Concept For Improving Watermark
Robustness Against JPEG Compression” ," IEEE Inter Conf. on Image
Processing 2010 (ICIP), Hong Kong, Sep 2010.
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Majumdar, A., and Ward, R. K., “A
Compressive Color Imaging With Group-Sparsity On Analysis Prrior”
Inter. Conf. on Image Processing (ICIP), pp. 1337-1340, Hong Kong, Sep
2010 .
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Mai, Z., Mansour, H., Mantiuk, R.,
Nasiopoulos, P., Ward, R. K., and Heidrich, W., "On-the-Fly Tone-Mapping
for Backward-Compatible High Dynamic Range Image/Video Compression,"
IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems 2010 (ISCAS),
Paris, France , May 2010.
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Dr. Rabab Ward
Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
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Office: ICICS 281
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Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering
University of
British Columbia
2366 Main Mall
Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z4
Canada |
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Telephone: (604) 822-4924 |
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Fax: (604) 822-9428
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email:
rababw-at-ece.ubc.ca
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Personal Homepage:
http://www.ece.ubc.ca/~rababw/ |
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