A City University of Hong Kong researcher has won one of the most prestigious prizes in the field of electronic engineering and multimedia with a paper on mathematical modeling to help store and generate images for use in graphic design and computer-based animation.

 

Dr Andrew Leung Chi-sing, Associate Professor in the Department of Electronic Engineering, and his collaborators won the Multimedia Prize Paper Award 2005, an annual award for an original paper in the field of multimedia published in the world-renowned journal IEEE Transactions on Multimedia

 

This award once again demonstrates international recognition for the quality of CityU’s applied research.

 

Dr Leung said he was surprised and honoured by the news that he and his colleagues had won. “After winning this prize the feeling is great because our work has been recognized by other scholars in this field,” he said. “To get a paper published in this journal is not an easy task and then to get selected from all the other papers as the best is a great honour.”

 

The paper was a collaborative project with researchers from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and the Chinese University of Hong Kong

 

Dr Leung joined CityU in 1999. His PhD research focused on neural networks and artificial intelligence.  His current areas of interest are computer graphics and image-based relighting.

 

His prize-winning paper looked at how to compress sampled images created under various lighting conditions and the method of storing the images to enable users to create novel images under novel illumination conditions in a real-time manner.

 

“Compressing images is relatively mature technology. Our contribution in this paper is to propose a new mathematical computation that helps generate novel images in real-time on PCs. This allows users to create new and interesting images very quickly on a PC,” Dr Leung said.

 

This new multimedia technique can be used for PC game design, computer graphics, design technology, animation, advertising and promotional work, he added.

 

Since publishing the prize-winning paper, Dr Leung and his colleagues have further developed this area of research. “The award was given to us for our work using static environment but our work now focuses on using a dynamic environment and high-frequency lighting effects such as shadow and highlighting,” Dr Leung said.