Klaus Seidel and Mihai Datcu
Image Semantic Coding 
Wednesday, September 27, 2006
Building 3 Auditorium - 3:30 PM

(Refreshments at 3:00 PM)

Klaus Seidel and Mihai Datcu , will talk about Image Semantic Coding. Traditionally Information Theory is focused to applications in communications and it refers mainly to coding, transmission, or compression of signals. However, implicitly, from its very beginning, information theory is closely related to statistics and machine learning. Thus, many other fields like stochastic inference, estimation and decision theory, optimization, communication or knowledge representation benefit from basic results derived in information theory. The goal of the presentation is to overview new applications and new developments in information theory relevant to inference, as well as general methods for information processing and understanding. The topics are: applications and extensions of Rate-Distortion theory, the methods of Information Bottleneck, the links to Bayesian, MDL and related methods, information and/or complexity based estimation, and inference.

Additional focus will be on specific methods for: image understanding, image semantic coding, image indexing and information mining. Proposing methods to distinguish signs and symbols and understand significance.

The possible applications are search engines in large satellite image archives, picture archiving and communication systems (PACS) for use in medical science, or multimedia systems.

Dr. Klaus Seidel
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, ETH, Zurich, Switzerland
Klaus Seidel received his B.S. degree in experimental physics in 1965 and the Ph.D. degree in 1971, both from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETHZ). He was with the Computer Vision Lab at ETHZ and head of the remote sensing group until 2002.

Since 1987 he was a Swiss Delegate and Expert in various Working Groups of the European Space Agency (ESA ) and at the same time functioning as the National Point of Contact for Switzerland. He is currently consultant for ESA projects specialized in image information mining related to remote sensing archives. He was also teaching courses in digital processing of satellite images and has published several papers concerning snow cover monitoring, geometric correction and multispectral analysis of satellite images, and on remote sensing image archival. Most recently he published a book together with J. Martinec on "Remote Sensing in Snow Hydrology".

He was involved in the Knowledge-driven Image Information Mining (KIM) project and is currently contributing to Knowledge Enabled Services (KES), KIM Validation (KIMV) and Knowledge Centered EO (KEO) projects for ESA. Dr. Seidel is member of the European Image Information Mining Coordination Group (IIMCG) and the Data Archiving and Distribution Technical Committee of IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society.

Professor Mihai Datcu, IEEE Senior Member
German Aerospace Center, DLR, Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany
Mihai Datcu received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electronics and Telecommunications from the University "Politechnica" of Bucharest UPB, Romania, in 1978 and 1986. In 1999 he received the title "Habilitation à diriger des recherches" from Université Louis Pasteur, Strasbourg, France. He holds a professorship in electronics and telecommunications with UPB since 1981. Since 1993 he is scientist with the German Aerospace Center (DLR), Oberpfaffenhofen. He is developing algorithms for model based information retrieval from high complexity signals and methods for scene understanding from synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and interferometric SAR data. He is engaged in research related to information theoretical aspects and semantic representations in advanced communication systems.

Currently he is Senior Scientist and Image Analysis research group leader with the Remote Sensing Technology Institute (IMF) of DLR, Oberpfaffenhofen, coordinator of the CNES-DLR-ENST Competence Centre on Information Extraction and Image Understanding for Earth Observation, and professor at ENST Paris. His interests are in Bayesian inference, information and complexity theory, stochastic processes, model-based scene understanding, image information mining, for applications in information retrieval and understanding of high resolution SAR and optical observations.

He has held visiting professor appointments from 1991 to 1992 with the Department of Mathematics of the University of Oviedo, Spain, from 2000 to 2002 with the Université Louis Pasteur, and the International Space University, both in Strasbourg, France. In 1994 was guest scientist with the Swiss Center for Scientific Computing (CSCS), Manno, Switzerland and in 2003 he was visiting professor with the University of Siegen, Germany. From 1992 to 2002 he had a longer invited professor assignment with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH Zürich. He is involved in advanced research programs for information extraction, data mining and knowledge discovery and data understanding with the European Space Agency (ESA), Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES), NASA, and in a variety of European projects. He is member of the European Image Information Mining Coordination Group (IIMCG).

IS&T Colloquium Committee Host: James Tilton