Jong Hwan Ko and Saibal Mukhopadhyay received the Best Paper Award at the International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design (ISLPED 2016), the premier conference in the area of low power electronics, on August 10 in San Francisco, California. They received the award for their paper entitled “An Energy-Aware Approach to Noise-Robust Moving Object Detection for Low-Power Wireless Image Sensor Platforms."

A Ph.D. student in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), Ko is advised by Saibal Mukhopadhyay, an ECE professor and the director of the Gigascale Reliable Energy Efficient Nanosystem (GREEN) Lab. This also marks the third year in a row that the GREEN Lab has won this highly competitive award.

Wireless video sensing is an important component in many civilian and military surveillance applications. In particular for remote surveillance applications, the sensor nodes are expected to continuously deliver visual information but under stringent constraints on system area and energy, and wireless channel bandwidth. Moreover, as the sensor nodes are generally exposed to the outdoor environment, they need to perform reliably under noisy and dynamic conditions such as rain and snow. This paper presents an energy-aware approach to moving object detection to reduce unnecessary energy for transmitting background scenes while requiring very low computation and memory and ensuring robust performance under noisy environments. An image sensor platform is demonstrated with the proposed approach.

This work is a part of a broader effort in the GREEN Lab in self-powered image/video sensor nodes through innovations in energy harvesting, mixed-signal circuit, ultra-low-power vision algorithm, and real-time control. This work is funded by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigator Program.

Cutline:  ECE Ph.D. student Jong Hwan Ko (right) is pictured with his advisor, ECE Professor Saibal Mukhopadhyay.