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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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Majumdar, A., and Ward, R. K., “Compressed Sensing
Based Near Real-Time Online Dynamic MRI Reconstruction”,
IEEE Trans. Medical Imaging, Aug 2012 (accepted).
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Majumdar, A., and Ward, R. K., “Algorithms to Approximately Solve NP Hard Row-Sparse
MMV Recovery Problem: Application to Compressive Color Imaging”,
IEEE JETCAS, Aug 2012 (accepted).
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Malekesmailli, M., Fatourechi, M., and Ward, R. K.,
“Fast Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search Algorithm in Hamming Space”,
IEEE Trans. PAMI Jul 2012 (accepted).
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Mai, Z., Doutre, C., Nasiopoulos, P., and Ward, R. K.,
“Rendering 3D High Dynamic Range Images: Subjective Evaluation of Tone-Mapping Methods and Preferred
3D Image Attributes”, Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing, Mar 2012 (accepted).
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Majumdar, A., and Ward, R. K.,
“Calibration-less Multi-coil MR Image Reconstruction”,
Elsevier Magnetic Resonance Imaging Feb 2012 (accepted).
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Yong, X., Fatourechi, M., Ward, R. K., and Birch, G. E.,
“Automatic Artifact Removal in a Self-Paced Hybrid BCI System”,
Journal of Neuroengineering and Rehabilitation
, vol 9, no 50, Aug 2012.
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Guha, T., and Ward, R. K.,
“Learning Sparse Representations for Human Action Recognition”,
IEEE Trans. PAMI vol 34, issue 8, pp. 1576-1588, Aug 2012.
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Yong, X., Fatourechi, M., Ward, R. K., and Birch, G. E.,
“The Design of a Point-and-Click System by Integrating a Self-Paced BCI with an Eye-tracker”,
IEEE JETCAS Special Issue on Brain Machine Interface
, vol 1, no 4, pp. 590-602, Dec 2011.
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Nezhadarya, E., Wang, J. Z., and Ward, R. K.,
"Robust Watermarking Based on Multiscale Gradient Direction Quantization"
IEEE Trans. Information Forensics and Security, vol 6, no 4, Dec 2011.
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Vahedi, E., Ward, R. K., Shah-Mansouri, V., Wong, W. S, and Blak, I. F.,
“On Securing RFIDs Against Blocking Attacks”, IEEE
MMTC Letter vol 2, no 6, pp. 16-18, Dec 2011.
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Conference Papers
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Nezhadarya, E., Ward, R. K., and Wang, J,. Z., "Wavelet-Based Gradient Transform
and Its Applications", IEEE MMSP ,
Banff, Canada, Sep 2012.
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Malekesmailli, M., and Ward, R. K., “A Novel Local Audio Fingerprinting
Algorithm”, IEEE MMSP, Banff, Canada, Sep 2012.
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Yong, X., Fatourechi, M., Ward, R. K., and Birch, G.,
"Adaptive Classification in a Self-Paced Hybrid BCI System", IEEE EMBC,
San Diego, CA, Aug 2012.
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Vahedi, E., Ward R. K., and Blake, I. F.,
"Analytical Modeling of RFID Generation-2 Protocol Using Absorbing Markov Chain Theorem",
IEEE Globecom, Anaheim, CA, Dec 2012.
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Majumdar, A., Ward, R. K., and Aboulnasr, T.,
"A FOCUSS Based Method for Low Rank Matrix Recovery",IEEE ICIP, Orlando, FL, Oct 2012.
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Mai,Z., Nasiopoulos, P., and Ward, R. K.,
“Evaluation of Preferred Brightness and Detail Levels in 3D and 2D Images Based on HDR Tone Mapping”,
IEEE ICASSP 2012
, Kyoto, Japan, Mar 2012.
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Khojasteh, M., and Ward, R. K.,
"Quantification of Membrane IHC Stains Through Multi-spectral Imaging",
ISBI 2012 ,
Spain, May 2012.
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Guha, T., and Ward, R. K.,
“ A Sparse Reconstruction Based Algorithm for Image and Video Classification",
IEEE ICASSP
, Kyoto, Japan, Mar 2012.
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Majumdar, A., and Ward, R. K., “Synthesis and
Analysis Prior Algorithms for Joint-Sparse Recovery” IEEE
ICASSP, Kyoto, Japan, Mar
2012 .
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Majumdar, A., and Ward, R. K.,
"Face Recognition from Video: An MMV Recovery Approach"
IEEE ICASSP,
Kyoto, Japan , Mar 2012.
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