“Signal Processing in the AI era” was the tagline of this year’s IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, taking place in Rhodes, Greece.
In this context, Brent de Weerdt, Xiangyu Yang, Boris Joukovsky, Alex Stergiou and Nikos Deligiannis presented ETRO’s research during poster sessions and oral presentations, with novel ways to process and understand graph, video, and audio data. Nikos Deligiannis chaired a session on Graph Deep Learning, attended the IEEE T-IP Editorial Board Meeting, and had the opportunity to meet with collaborators from the VUB-Duke-Ugent-UCL joint lab.
Featured articles:
- De Weerdt, B. et al., “Designing Transformer Networks for Sparse Recovery of Sequential Data Using Deep Unfolding” (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10094712)
- Yang X. et al., “Relevance Propagation through Deep Conditional Random Fields” (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10095075)
- Stergiou A. et al., “Play it back: Iterative attention for audio recognition” (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10096532, developed at the University of Bristol)
ETRO Prof Nikolaos Deligiannis was asked for a contribution to the Belgian Senate on Monday Jan 18. The hearing was focused on fake news in social media and representatives of Facebook and Google Belgium as well as from the EC were also present.
(The input from Nikos starts after 2:20h)
On April 25th 2025 at 16:00, Ayman Morsy will defend their PhD entitled “A NOVEL APPROACH TO DEPTH-SENSE IMAGING USING CORRELATION-ASSISTED DIRECT TIME-OF-FLIGHT”.
Everybody is invited to attend the presentation in room I.0.03 or online via this link.
Time-of-flight (ToF) imaging has emerged as a vital technology in machine vision and sensing, expanding into applications such as augmented and virtual reality, gaming, robotics, autonomous driving, autofocus, and facial recognition on smartphones and laptops. ToF technology determines the distance to an object within the detection range by emitting a light source and measuring the time it takes to return. This round-trip time determines the object’s distance, with different sensing technologies employing distinct methods to determine this time.
For ToF applications, developing sensors with high image resolution, low power consumption, and the ability to function reliably in high ambient light conditions is desirable. This dissertation presents the development of a novel single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD)-based pixel called Correlation-Assisted Direct Time-of-Flight (CA-dToF), designed for in-pixel ambient light suppression and characterized by low power consumption and a scalable pixel structure. The CA-dToF pixel uses a laser pulse correlated with two orthogonal sinusoidal signals as input to two switched capacitor channels, which average out detected ambient light while accumulating the laser pulse round-trip time.
To gain insights into CA-dToF pixel operation, both Python simulation and analytical modeling were developed. Two generations of the CA-dToF pixel were developed and characterized, with the second-generation pixel achieving the first operational performance under high ambient light conditions. The two-generation CA-dToF pixel was tested under various lighting conditions and pixel design variations. Additionally, noise sources within the pixel implementation were analyzed, and potential solutions were proposed.
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Selene De Sutter started her PhD at ETRO in 2019. Since childhood she suffers from Diabetes type 1 and she received an insulin pump for treating this. The choice of following the Master Biomedical Engineering was obvious, so that she could develop technologies that would help people with medical conditions, like the insulin pump did for her. If Selene did not choose for am Engineering training you could have met her on stage, as she was hesitating to follow a Jazz training. Now she combines Engineering Sciences with music as a hobby.
The program creates lots of possibilities so that you have a lot of options. It starts general and you can choose options along the go according to your interests. It does take some perseverance though!
Biomedical Imaging was the course Selene liked most in the master Biomedical Engineering. A very visual kind of programming that showed its usefulness in practice immediately. It also became her topic for her PhD which is her next big goal. What will happen after the PhD is not clear yet, but she wants to work on something useful and enjoy what she is doing.
A golden tip from Selene: Working hard is important, but don’t forget to enjoy yourself at the university!
ETRO is the focus in an article on the website https://belgian-research.eu/
Since its establishment in 1971, the Department of Electronics and Informatics (ETRO) has embraced an interdisciplinary approach. Today, it is the largest department within the Faculty of Engineering at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, bringing together a critical mass of over 150 researchers from across the globe. The research group ETRO.RDI – where RDI stands for Research, Development, and Innovation – comprises approximately 160 collaborators, including many from outside the department.
Prof. Dr. Em. Roger Vounckx gave his last lecture last Friday 29 March 2024.
Many thanks for all the insights you gave us at ETRO, the students and VUB. Both in science and in many other topics.
Cheers!
