This award is for the purchase of equipment to upgrade a vision laboratory to enable the laboratory to perform research in a number of new areas. The research that this equipment supports includes research in low bit-rate coding of color signals, knowledge-based video feature extraction, adaptive video coding using non-uniform sampling, information preserving video coders, and high speed architectures for seismic image interpretation. In recent years there has been unprecedented progress in the development of cost effective video systems that can provide a variety of visual communication services: video conferencing, video telephones, facsimile transmission, high definition television,etc. One of the driving forces for these innovations has been the development of powerful signal processing algorithms and fast$and inexpensive hardware optimized for them. It is still a technical challenge, however, to design these systems to operate economically at video rates. Seismic signal processing involves signals with lower bandwidth than video signals, but many of the issues are similar. In particular, both must work with signals containing millions of samples and both must use innovative algorithms and multiprocessor implementations to operate efficiently. The Digital Signal Processing Laboratory at Georgia Tech has been involved in research in digital signal processing and its applications in speech processing, image processing, and efficient digital architectures for nearly twenty years. All of the projects supported by this award are concerned with the development of algorithms and architectures to operate economically on a large number of signals.
