Grant: Research Tools and Instruments - Category 1 (<$150,000)

Human kind is entering an era of experience. There has been an exponentially increasing demand on developing novel technologies that can enrich and enhance human experiences in consuming digital media data. Among all digital media forms, digital image and video have become the most dominant in the past few years. As a result, assessing and improving quality-of-visual experience (QoVE) is becoming one of the most critical issues that urgently requires technical solutions. The Image and Vision Computing Laboratory led by Prof. Zhou Wang at University of Waterloo is a world leader with strong track record and broad impact in the field of perceptual image/video quality assessment and processing, and is targeting at QoVE as its major research direction in the next 5-10 years.The equipment funded by this NSERC RTI grant will help build a necessary infrastructure and experimental environment to provide strong and timely supports for several ongoing NSERC projects, which include a Steacie Memorial Fellowship, a Discovery Grant, a Discovery Accelerator Supplement Award, and a Strategic Grant. These projects aim to develop novel theories and methodologies in measuring and improving QoVE in a wide variety of network visual communication applications including video-on-demand, video broadcasting, videoconferencing, HDTV, 3DTV, Internet TV, and wireless video services. The infrastructure will also train highly qualified personnel and students and help them acquire knowledge and unique experiences on advanced multimedia communication, digital media, and media quality control and enhancement technologies. These highly qualified personnel and students are expected to be desirable in the fast-growing digital media and multimedia communication industries in Canada. As such, the leading technologies produced and the highly qualified personnel trained through these projects will make positive impact on the economy and job market in Canada.