Since the invention of holography in 1948, researchers are attempting to realise realistic 3D projections. Recent developments in photonics, microelectronics and computer engineering offer the prospect that this will soon be feasible. Holographic television with acceptable visual quality will be achievable within the next decade. But to generate and process these 3D images we require massive supercomputers given current technologies. Moreover, distributing the associated huge data volumes over a network is not an evident problem to solve.
In order to alleviate these bottlenecks, the ERC Consolidator Grant ‘Sparse Signal Coding for Interference-based Imaging Modalities (INTERFERE)’ obtained by Prof. Peter Schelkens will pursue suitable sparse data representations for holographic signals. Moreover, holographic coding architectures will be designed. Research in the context of this PhD position will be particularly targeted towards sparse signal coding strategies for holographic signal.

Description

WORK ENVIRONMENT
The Electronics and Informatics department (ETRO) belongs to the Faculty of Engineering Sciences at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and is embedded in the Multimedia Technology Department of the iMinds Research Institute.
ETRO performs research on the representation, transmission, analysis, quality assessment and visualisation of multidimensional signals. ETRO has built a large international collaboration network with a wide variety of industrial partners, academic institutions and R&D centres, and participates in a numerous fundamental, strategic and applied research projects in these domains. 
In (multi-dimensional) data compression, ETRO has been active for more than 20 years in various research areas, including predictive and transform-based coding of images, video and meshes, near-lossless compression, multiple description coding, joint source and channel coding, error concealment, distributed video coding, visual quality assessment, and optimised media transmission over networks. 

RESEARCH TOPIC
Since the invention of holography in 1948, researchers are attempting to realise realistic 3D projections. Recent developments in photonics, microelectronics and computer engineering offer the prospect that this will soon be feasible. Holographic television with acceptable visual quality will be achievable within the next decade. But to generate and process these 3D images we require massive supercomputers given current technologies. Moreover, distributing the associated huge data volumes over a network is not an evident problem to solve.
In order to alleviate these bottlenecks, the ERC Consolidator Grant ‘Sparse Signal Coding for Interference-based Imaging Modalities (INTERFERE)’ obtained by Prof. Peter Schelkens will pursue suitable sparse data representations for holographic signals. Moreover, holographic coding architectures will be designed that will address the bandwidth issues in this project. Additionally, improved models of the human visual system will be developed which will allow to minimise the impact of reconstruction errors during the visualisation of the holographic content.
Research in the context of this PhD position will be particularly targeted towards sparse signal coding strategies for holographic signal.
This project will not only have a significant impact on the further developments in holographic television, but also seeding new applications in fields such as of medical imaging, biophotonics, life sciences and telecommunications. 
Besides the scientific challenge, the position provides a great opportunity to work closely together with experienced researchers in the field of multidimensional signal processing and photonics. 

KEYWORDS
Sparse signal coding, signal modeling, digital holography, photonics.

Nr of positions available : 1

Research Fields

Engineering - Electronic engineering
Computer science - Digital systems
Physics - Optics
Computer science - 3 D modelling

Career Stage

Early stage researcher or 0-4 yrs (Post graduate) 

Research Profiles

First Stage Researcher (R1) 

Comment/web site for additional job details

www.etro.vub.ac.be/Vacancies/

Requirements

wmatthey@etro.vub.ac.be

15/02/2015

01/03/2015