Prof. Homer H. Chen and his research team at the NTU College of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science were named winners of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society's 2008 Circuits and Systems for Video Technology Transactions Best Paper Award. This distinguished honor is especially noteworthy as this was the first time Taiwanese scholars have received this award.

Prof. Chen's award-winning paper, "Integration of Digital Stabilizer with Video Codec for Digital Video Cameras," was published in IEEE's Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology , in July 2007. The paper presents his team's research findings on a novel approach to digital image stabilizers and has received much attention and acclaim. Prof. Chen was commended publicly for his research prowess during IEEE's 2008 International Conference on Circuits and Systems for Communications.

According to Prof. Chen, while digital video cameras are increasingly popular, not everyone is a trained professional photographer. Such factors as inadvertent shaking of the hand or platform movement can cause jerky image motion that is distressing to the human eye. Although traditional mechanical and optical stabilizing systems have long been in use, the components for such systems are expensive.

Seeking a more economical solution, Prof. Chen's research team tested novel schemes to integrate a digital video camera's digital stabilizer with its video codec. The digital stabilizer is technology that uses image processing to achieve stability by removing unintentional image displacements, while the video codec is technology that conserves image storage space. Both are indispensable components for a digital video camera. In traditional designs, however, these two functions operate separately. Prof. Chen's research team discovered that, although the functions of these two devices are different, they have many similar algorithms and can share a considerable amount of image movement data.

Based on this discovery, Prof. Chen and his research team tested several ways to integrate them such that the number of algorithms for digital stabilizers and video codecs were reduced without affecting the anti-shake effect and the quality of image compression. Their innovations are suitable for system-on-chips production, and thus are a major contribution to the digital camcorder and camera industry. Indeed, this is the first design in the world incorporating such breakthrough integrating functions.

Prof. Chen's personal website: http://www. ee.ntu.edu.tw/profile?id=60.

  Copyright 2008 NTU Secretariat