This REU site project allows eight undergraduate students to participate in a ten-week summer program at Computer Science Department of Utah State University. This summer program focuses on several hands-on stimulating research projects including face recognition, eye tracking, digital watermarking, image compression, and content based image retrieval. These projects will address the broad spectrums and the challenging issues in the field of computer vision and image processing (CVIP) and will emphasize on several CVIP techniques and their important utilities in some interesting and crucial applications. The REU participants will be presented with a broad range of components in these research topics so that each student will be able to choose a component of a project rather than have one assigned. This research will ensure at least four of the eight participants are underrepresented students and ensure at least four students are from other institutions, especially those institutions where research programs are limited. This active and regional recruitment plan will especially help underrepresented students and the students who are limited exposed to research to be acquainted with interesting research projects and gain confidence in pursuing their degrees, seeking industrial technology related jobs, and continuing pursuing an advanced degree in graduate schools.
