This is the first year of a three year continuing award. It provides funds to support the collaboration of researchers from several U.S. institutions with their counterparts in Europe who are funded by the European ESPRIT program for a project on Geometry- Driven Diffusion in Vision. The U.S. research groups are led by Pietro Perona (CalTech), Jitendra Malik (University of California at Berkeley), David Mumford (Harvard University), Stephen Pizer and Ross Whitaker (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), and Sanjoy Mitter (MIT). A number of European investigators are to be involved, from Utrecht University in the Netherlands, Katholieke Universiteit Lueven in Belgium, University of Las Palmas in Spain, University of Paris IX Dauphine in France, the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) and Linkoping University in Sweden, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. Some important research resultsbased on nonlinear diffusion processes have arisen for early vision tasks. This consortium is investigating the theory of this approach to image processing, some testbed implementations, possible applications such as medical image enhancement, and possible insights into the natural parallelism, cooperative/competitive mechanisms, and neural feedback mechanisms between layers in the brain.
