Welcome to my academic website!

I am currently a Ph.D. Candidate with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Ryerson University. I am under the supervision of Dr. Dimitri Androutsos. My research interests are in computer vision, image segmentation, image processing, object recognition, Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR), stereo vision, and 3DTV.

My Ph.D. research focuses on the accurate and efficient conversion of conventional single view, or 2D, images and video footage, and to convert them to stereoscopic 3D - commonly known as 2D to 3D Conversion. Essentially, we see the world with two views: one from the left eye, and the other from the right. These two slightly different views are fused together by the visual cortex of our brains, and allow us to perceive depth. 2D to 3D Conversion is concerned about taking normal footage, shot with a single camera, and creating left and right views of the scene for human perception. This is quite an unconstrained and ill-posed problem to solve, as we are trying to estimate a sense of depth from information that was originally lost in the process of capturing the scene on a video camera. Ways of doing this automatically have been investigated in the past, and there have been many approaches to do so. However, the accuracy leaves much to be desired, and so my focus is on semi-automatic approaches, where you sparsely mark the depth of objects in an image, or over various keyframes in video. The system or algorithm then determines the rest of the depths in the rest of the image or video sequence. This has been shown to be much more accurate, and the user has more control in the conversion process. Though this is an ill-posed problem, there has been a lot of interest in investigating this area of multimedia and signal processing, and many companies and institutions are looking into this, such as Disney Research Zurich and Tel Aviv University in Israel.

I received my Bachelors of Engineering (B.Eng.) degree in Computer Engineering from Ryerson in 2006. I graduated with Honours standing, and I was also amongst one of the first graduates of the program. My undergraduate thesis was done under the supervision of Dr. Mike Kassam which was the "Smart Physiological Signal Simulator" - a microcontroller-based system for artificially generating heart physiological signals for the calibration of medical equipment and for the training of medical students on the characteristics of such signals. I received my Masters of Applied Science (M.A.Sc.) degree in Electrical Engineering from Ryerson in 2008, also under the supervision of Dr. Androutsos. My M.A.Sc. thesis was on "Unconstrained Colour Logo and Trademark Retrieval using Colour Edge Gradient Co-occurrence Histograms". Essentially, it is a search engine that is designed to automatically detect logos and trademarks in any image or video sequence, using the actual logos or trademark images as the queries themselves, rather than using keywords for searching. The biggest application for this framework was for advertising companies to determine whether the sum of money they spent was well justified, as they would be able to measure the amount of exposure their logo or trademark has in footage that would show these prominantly, such as sports video, or commercials.

During my time as an undergraduate and graduate student at Ryerson, I have received many awards and accolades. The most prestigious one is the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship, which is the most prestigious Ph.D. scholarship to be awarded in Canada. Other awards include: The Ryerson Gold Medal, the Howard H. Kerr Memorial Scholarship, the Ontario Graduate Scholarship, the Dennis Mock Student Leadership Award, and several Best Teaching Assistant Awards.

I also enjoy teaching, and am currently serving as a part-time instructor with the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Ryerson. I have taught ELE 635: Communication Systems and ELE 639: Control Systems. I also have made my lectures available online in video format, as I have lectured on a Tablet PC, and used screen capture software to capture my desktop, and have captured my voice, which is in sync with all of the actions I perform on the tablet, so it is as if you were in class listening to me talk. I have also served as a Teaching Assistant in the past, having 5 years of experience, and have TAed over 20 courses during my time as a graduate student. More information about this can be found on my teaching page. I am also serving as a volunteer for many groups and organizations inside and outside Ryerson, such as being the President of the Electrical & Computer Engineering Graduate Student Union, the Graduate Student Representative for the Departmental Council, the Vice-President of Membership Development with the IEEE GOLD Toronto Section, and the Webmaster for the IEEE Toronto Section.

I am an Engineering Intern Training member with the Professional Engineers of Ontario, an Intern Member with the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers, a graduate student member with the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers, member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, and a student member with the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers.