Student Advised by Doermann to Receive Best Student Paper Award at ICPR 2016

Sungmin Eum (background, right), a fifth-year doctoral student in electrical and computer engineering advised by David Doermann (foreground, left), will receive the Piero Zamperoni Award for best student paper at the 2016 International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR).

ICPR is considered a leading international forum to discuss recent advances involving pattern recognition, machine learning and computer vision. This year’s conference will be held from Dec. 4-8 in Cancun, Mexico.

Eum will present his work at the conference and receive the award on Dec. 7.

“Content Selection Using Frontalness Evaluation of Multiple Frames”—authored by Eum and Doermann—addresses the problem of selecting instances of a planar object either in a video or from a set of images based on an evaluation of its “frontalness,” or best frontal view.

In the paper, the researchers introduce the idea of “evaluating frontalness” by computing how close the object’s surface normal aligns with the optical axis of a camera.

This approach can be valuable in quickly understanding documents or images that are captured in a less-than-perfect environment, or where the camera intrinsic parameters are not known.

“I am humbled that my research was recognized by some of the leading researchers in pattern recognition,” says Eum, who is presently finishing up an internship at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory. “This was a difficult project, and one that I was not sure would bear the results we were looking for. I am grateful for the support of my research and academic advisers on this project.”

The Zamperoni Award is restricted to papers authored or co-authored by a student. There must be no more than two authors, and if only one author of a co-authored paper is a student, then the other author must certify that the work presented in the paper is primarily the work of the student.

“Sungmin persevered on this topic, even when facing scientific challenges that were not insignificant. I am proud of his accomplishments and look forward to further exploration in this area,” says Doermann, a senior research scientist in UMIACS who is currently on leave while serving as a program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).