Frederik received a PhD in Engineering in 2014 at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel entitled “Visual search in mobile and medical applications: feature extraction and classification, interoperable image search and human-machine interaction”. His research focuses on image processing, interoperable access to image data and media privacy, security, authenticity and integrity. He has been involved in various research projects in the medical, mobile and cultural domains. Frederik is an active member of the JPEG standardisation committee (ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG1) where he contributed to several standards including JPSearch (ISO/IEC 24800), the JPEG Universal Metadata Box Format (ISO/IEC 19566-5) and JPEG Privacy and Security (ISO/IEC 19566-4) and currently chairs activities on JPEG Fake Media and Non-Fubgable Tokens (NFTs). Frederik is also co-founder of the VUB spin-off company Universum Digitalis.
Frederik has been responsible for the image processing and online public access of Closer to Van Eyck and Inside Bruegel. These innovative websites provide public access to high resolution multimodal image data of the art works of Van Eyck and Bruegel respectively. Closer to Van Eyck has been a crucial asset during the restoration of the Ghent Altarpiece. In 2018 the project was awarded with the E-gov Award for user friendliness and was nominated in two more categories (Best Project & Open Data). In 2019, the Verona project that resulted in the “Further Works” extension was awarded with a prestigious European Heritage Award. Inside Bruegel was released in parallel with the exhibition “Bruegel. The Hand of the Master” at Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna (KHM).