Compression for scene perception and understanding: deep-learning approaches
Yao Wang, New York University Tandon School of Engineering
Abstract
The first part of this talk will review recent progress in deep-learning based image and video coding where the compressed bits are used to reconstruct the original scene for perception. I will start by motivating the potential benefits from using learning-based approaches, then introduce the basic framework for learnt image compression, and finally move onto learnt video coding highlighting different avenues for replacing the classical motion-compensated prediction pipeline. The second part will discuss how to compress images to optimize for scene understanding tasks such as object detection, which is becoming increasingly important for cloud-assisted visual computing. I will contrast two different approaches: image compression followed by decompression followed by object detection, vs. compressing the intermediate features generated for object detection.
Biography
Yao Wang is a Professor at New York University Tandon School of Engineering (formerly Polytechnic University, Brooklyn, NY), with joint appointment in Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Biomedical Engineering. She is also Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs for NYU Tandon since June 2019. Her research areas include video coding and streaming, multimedia signal processing, computer vision, and medical imaging. She is the leading author of a textbook titled Video Processing and Communications, and has published over 250 papers in journals and conference proceedings. She received New York City Mayor's Award for Excellence in Science and Technology in the Young Investigator Category in year 2000. She was elected Fellow of the IEEE in 2004 for contributions to video processing and communications. She received the IEEE Communications Society Leonard G. Abraham Prize Paper Award in the Field of Communications Systems in 2004, and the IEEE Communications Society Multimedia Communication Technical Committee Best Paper Award in 2011. She was a keynote speaker at the 2010 International Packet Video Workshop, INFOCOM Workshop on Contemporary Video in 2014, the 2018 Picture Coding Symposium, and the 2020 ACM Multimedia Systems Conference (MMSys’20). She received the NYU Tandon Distinguished Teacher Award in 2016.