A team of undergraduate students (Team NFPUndercover) from the Department of Electronic and Telecommunication Engineering (ENTC), University of Moratuwa, became the 2nd runner up in the IEEE Video and Image Processing Cup (VIP Cup) 2021 competition at the 28th International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP) 2021. The team consists of four ENTC undergraduates, Mr. Jathurshan Pradeepkumar, Mr. Udith Haputhanthri, Mr. Mohamed Afham and Ms. Mithunjha Anandakumar. Mr. Ashwin de Silva tutored the team, and Dr. Chamira Edussooriya supervised the team.
ICIP is an annual flagship conference of the IEEE Signal Processing Society which is one of the world’s premier associations for signal processing engineers, academics, and industry professionals. This year the conference was held from the 19th to 22nd of September 2021, virtually in Anchorage, Alaska, USA. The IEEE VIP Cup competition is one of the most prestigious competitions in video and image processing for undergraduate students.
This year’s task was to develop a robust algorithm to estimate in-bed human poses under heavy occlusion caused by blankets and varying illumination conditions. This algorithm can be utilized for inbed human behavior monitoring during sleep or rest state, which is crucial for prognostic, diagnostic and treatment of many healthcare complications. Team NFPUndercover proposed a novel solution for this task leveraging multiple approaches from both computer vision and signal processing such as extreme occlusion-based data augmentation and label smoothening via knowledge distillation. Specifically, their approach is feasible to implement in a resource constrained setup.
Image processing and machine vision is a branch of artificial intelligence and signal processing that models and learns the image representations to autonomously accomplish downstream tasks such as image classification, object detection, semantic segmentation. It utilizes advanced statistical and mathematical algorithms to make a machine see and understand the real world as humans do. This achievement by UoM places Sri Lanka at a higher position in the world of image processing community.
