ETROVUB

ETRO delegation at ICASSP 2023

“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 helps investigate marine plastic by satellite image enhancement.

“Imaging & Machine Vision Europe“‘s Abigail Williams speaks to scientists tracking marine plastic using satellite spectral imagery. For ETRO, Prof Jonathan C-W Chan was interviewed. Below you can find his remarks.

Professor Jonathan Chan, noted that the ideal sensor to detect marine plastic should possess more spectral measurement capabilities at SWIR wavelengths.

Chan is working on the Muss2 project, which is using spectral and spatial enhancement methods to generate simulated Earth orbit hyperspectral shortwave infrared images and data from the Copernicus Sentinel 2 satellite using spectral response function modelling.

Hyperspectral images taken from Earth orbit are not always available and their coverage is not as large as conventional missions, such as Landsat and Sentinel. To overcome these limitations, Chan said the Muss2 team will apply a sparse theory-based method to enhance multispectral images from the Sentinel 2 satellite. The expected results are what he described as synthetic Sentinel 2 hyperspectral images at a spatial resolution of 10m, with the same coverage as Sentinel 2 multispectral images.

‘So far, we have been able to generate such images based on Hyperion and Prisma spectral configurations, [and] quantitative assessments are promising,’ he said. ‘In addition, we apply a deep learning-based method for the spatial enhancement of Prisma images to assist in the detection of smaller objects.’

Chan added: ‘All the data inputs for the project are from open sources, including Sentinel 2, Hyperion and Prisma. The launch of Prisma in 2019 was a major milestone, and soon EnMap will be launched. These are full stretch hyperspectral images at 400-2,500nm with hundreds of spectral bands and represent the most powerful Earth orbit data source for environmental monitoring. The potential is not yet fully understood nor exploited, and scientific communities are just beginning to understand all the pre-processing protocols and data quality issues.’

Loris Giordano got the best student paper award

Loris Giordano got the best student paper award at the AMAI workshop of MICCAI 2025 for the paper “A modular deep-learning pipeline for automated aorta characterization on CT”, co-authored by Loris Giordano, Jakub Ceranka, Selene De Sutter, Kaoru Tanaka, Gert Van Gompel, Tom Lenaerts, and Jef Vandemeulebroucke.

Charcot Fund 2023

The Charcot Fund Jury met on December 9, 2022.

The project “Disentangling cognitive functioning and visual scanning deficits in cognitive test scores” (Prom: Prof J. Van Schependom), has been selected by the Jury for the Charcot Fund 2023.

The Charcot Fund Ceremony will take place on 31 January 2023 at the University Foundation.

https://www.fondation-charcot.org/en/charcot-research-fund

Johan Stiens @ European Parliament Interest Group

Johan Stiens participated as Belgian representative of BSMBEC-NCBME this morning to the “European Parliament Interest Group on Biomedical Engineering”

The fourth meeting with European Parliament Members took place in hybrid mode on March 21, 2023, on the premises of the European Parliament hosted by MEP Stelios Kympouropoulos with the support of the European Alliance of Medical and Biological Engineering and Science (EAMBES) as part of a week dedicated to the role of technology in health. The event was entitled: “Pandemic Management and Preparedness – Telemedicine and the Role of Innovative Technologies in Securing a Safer Future”. Please find here the final Agenda of the meeting.

VUB spin-off instrumentaal bij de digitalisering van Vlaamse primitief Hans Memling.

Naar aanleiding van de heropening van het Sint-Janshospitaal museum (Museum Sint-Janshospitaal) in Brugge op 16 december zijn de schilderijen van Hans Memling gedigitaliseerd. In dit complex process speelt Universum Digitalis, een spin-off van het Departement Elektronica en Informatica (ETRO) van de VUB, een cruciale rol. De spin-off, onder leiding van professor Frederik Temmermans, verwerkte in opdracht van Musea Brugge honderden hoge resolutie detailopnames die door het Koninklijk Instituut voor het Kunstpatrimonium (KIK-IRPA) met nauwgezette methodiek werden gecapteerd. Universum Digitalis stoomde giga-pixel beelden klaar voor gebruik op het web, maar ook voor verder onderzoek in allerlei toepassingen.

De werken zijn online beschikbaar in hoge resolutie (closertomemling.be), en laten bezoekers toe om de kleinste details van de meester vele malen uitvergroot te bewonderen. Begin 2024 volgen ook andere belichtingstechnieken zoals infrarood, streeflicht en x-stralen.

Dit is niet het eerste wapenfeit van Universum Digitalis. De spin-off spitst zich toe op ultra hoge resolutiebeeldverwerking bij digitalisering van het onschatbare kunstpatrimonium, maar ook de verwezenlijking van interfaces die dit soort beelden eenvoudig toegankelijk maakt voor zowel de kunstwetenschapper als de museumbezoeker. Ze bouwden toepassingen voor musea, culturele instellingen en anderen voor de digitale reproductie van schilderijen/kunst in extreem hoge resolutie: van webtoepassingen tot museumkiosken. Voorbeelden zijn de werken van Bruegel (insidebruegel.net) en het oevre van Van Eyck (closertovaneyck.kikirpa.be), een project dat eerder bekroond werd met een Belgian E-Gov Award en European Heritage / Europa Nostra Award.

Contact:

Frederik Temmermans: : frederik.temmermans@vub.be 0479 49 94 26

ETRO again successful in Lifetech.brussels MedTech Accelerator

Two of ETRO’s postdocs, Angel for the project Equitable Oxymetry and Abel for the I-Healthy path project, have been selected for the MedTech accelerator: https://lifetech.brussels/en/medtech-accelerator-en/.