One D²iCE Researcher's Experience at the Electronic Imaging Symposium in San Francisco

On the 20th of January 2024, as members of the D²iCE group, we were delighted to depart from Dublin Airport on a journey to the 36th Edition of the Electronic Imaging Conference 2024 in Burlingame, San Francisco, California. This conference is one of the most popular in terms of Image Quality and Image Processing which covers a vast array of applications including security, virtual reality, machine vision, and data analysis, among others. Some of the greatest minds gather to discuss the latest research breakthroughs of the 21st century.

21st January

Daniel Jakab, a member of D2iCE, had an incredible opportunity to attend two Short Courses offered by Electronic Imaging. The first course was called “Image Quality Foundations: Standards for Mobile, Automotive, and Machine Vision Applications” presented by Dr.Peter D. Burns, Managing Director of Burns Digital Imaging (formed in 2011) and Don Williams, Consultant of Image Science Associates. We discussed various industrial applications of Image Quality Measurement techniques from color and test charts to imaging standards published by ISO and the Automotive IEEE P2020 Working Group (formed in 2016). The second course was called “Hands-on Practice with Automotive Image Quality Measurements” by Dr Laurent Chanas, Image Quality Expert and Product Owner of DXOMARK Image Labs, an Independent French technology company assessing smartphones, cameras, and lenses since 2008. This course gave a hands-on laboratory experience of how cameras are measured and assessed given various imaging conditions such as Light Emitting Diode (LED) Flicker, Dynamic Range, Noise, Lens Flare, and Image Sharpness measured by Spatial Frequency Response Slanted Edge Targets. Below is shown a visual setup of four camera test modules which are available on the DXOMARK website: Automotive - DXOMARK - Excellence On Your Service

22nd January

On this opening day of the conference, keynote speaker, Norman Koren (the Founder of Imatest LLC, a leader in image quality testing since 2004) was invited to the Autonomous Vehicles and Machines (AVM) session chaired by Dr Patrick Denny (University of Limerick) and Dr Elaine Jin at Rivian. All image quality metrics were presented in detail that is available for experimentation including Edge Ideal Observer Signal-to-Noise-Ratio (Edge SNRi) and Noise Equivalent Quanta (NEQ) as well as others.

Following Norman Koren’s keynote presentation, Daniel Jakab, a member of D2iCE, presented “Measuring Natural Scenes SFR of Automotive Fisheye Cameras”. Please see the official publication of this work in the Image Science and Technology (IS&T) library (10.2352/EI.2024.36.17.AVM-109). This work would not have been possible without Dr Eoin Martino Grua (University of Limerick), Dr Brian Michael Deegan (University of Galway), Dr Anthony Scanlan (University of Limerick), Dr Pepijn Van De Ven (University of Limerick) and Dr Ciarán Eising (University of Limerick). This work was supported, in part, by the Science Foundation Ireland grant 13/RC/2094 P2 and co-funded under the European Regional Development Fund through the Southern & Eastern Regional Operational Programme to Lero - the Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre for Software (www.lero.ie) and sponsorship from Valeo Vision Systems. We would like to thank Dr Oliver van Zwanenberg for assisting in the adaptation of the NS-SFR framework for Automotive Fisheye Cameras.

23rd January

On the 23rd of January, Sushil Sharma, a member of D2iCE, presented “Optimizing Ego Vehicle Trajectory Prediction: The Graph Enhancement Approach”. Please see the official publication of this work in the Image Science and Technology (IS&T) library (10.2352/EI.2024.36.17.AVM-115). This work would not have been possible without Aryan Singh (University of Limerick), Ganesh Sistu (University of Limerick), Dr Mark Halton (University of Limerick), and Dr Ciarán Eising (University of Limerick). This publication has emanated from research supported in part by a grant from Science Foundation Ireland under Grant number 18/CRT/6049.

We also had the pleasure of attending two Camera Quality Assessment sessions Part I and Part II where a notable mention is Megan Elizabeth Borek from Imatest LLC who presented research on skin tone variations called: “Evaluating Camera Performance in Face-Present Scenes with Diverse Skin Tones”. This perhaps underlines the importance of work on natural scenes that contain more information than laboratory measurements and could indicate a future direction in which image quality assessment may go in terms of research. A Focal Talk by Clemenz Portmann from Google called: “Android Camera Apps: Designing in a Sea of Thousands of Cameras” showed evaluating Android cameras using an Image Test Suite (ITS) and Camera Test Suite (CTS) strategy. Perhaps the most notable point made is the inherent effort involved in scalability for camera performance measurement and the coordination of various engineering teams to make this possible.

24th January

There was a fascinating Plenary Talk by Dr Joseph M. Howard from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center called “Imaging the Universe: NASA Space Telescopes from James Webb to Nancy Grace Roman and Beyond”. This session contained a detailed synopsis of the planning, design, testing, preparation and launch of the 3-mirror James Webb telescope (currently located at the Lagrange L2 point of the solar system), a revolutionary technology for the study of cosmic history, which was launched on December 25th, 2021. Visual image quality improvements were illustrated in this presentation comparing James Webb to the Hubble Space Telescope (its predecessor). There was also discussion on a future telescope project called the Nancy Grace Roman telescope which is a next-generation wide Field of View (FOV) (100 times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope FOV) observatory of the universe which is planned for launch in May 2027. This telescope will generate a 3D map of the universe, use microlensing to search for planets in distant solar systems and investigate the distribution of both normal and dark matter in the universe.

25th January

This marked the final day of the Electronic Imaging conference. It was a pleasure to attend the Image Quality and System Performance conference session chaired by Dr Peter D. Burns to see Dr Laurent Chanas of DXOMARK present “Lens Flare Measurement for RGB Black-box Camera” and Sarah Kerr from Imatest LLC present “Recommendations for the Detection and Analysis of the ISO 12233:2023 e-SFR Slanted Star”. Sarah Kerr’s presentation contained a new Sagittal and Tangential Slanted Star Image Quality measurement chart from the 2023 version of the ISO:12233 image quality standard. Experimental results show that it is possible to extract slanted edges from this new chart using star localization via Computer Vision where the centres of the slanted stars were detected using the Walsh-Hadamard Transform.