Professor Stanley H. Chan and 2nd year PhD student Omar A. Elgendy received the Best Paper Award in 2016 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), held September 25-28, 2016 in Phoenix. ICIP is the largest image processing conference in IEEE Signal Processing Society, attracting more than 2,000 paper submissions annually.

The title of the paper is "Image Reconstruction and Threshold Design for Quanta Image Sensors". Quanta image sensor refers to a class of solid state image sensors that have single photon sensitivity. It is envisioned as a candidate solution for the next generation image sensor after CMOS due to their high resolution, high speed and very low full well capacity. However, over the past two decades the majority of the research has only been done on device material and circuit design. Signal processing algorithms and theories are largely untapped. In this paper, Professor Chan and Elgendy presented an image reconstruction algorithm and a threshold design scheme. The former addresses a fundamental problem of the sensors because quanta image sensors require a careful "decoding" method to reconstruct images from the single photon measurements. The latter is crucial for improving the dynamic range of the sensor.

Professor Chan came to Purdue in 2014 as an assistant professor in ECE and statistics. Prior to joining Purdue, he was a Croucher Foundation postdoctoral fellow at Harvard in 2012-2014. He received the PhD degree in Electrical Engineering, and the MA degree in mathematics from UC San Diego in 2011 and 2009, respectively. Elgendy is a 2nd year PhD student in ECE. He received the BSc degree in Electrical Engineering, and the MSc degree in Engineering Mathematics from Cairo University, Egypt in 2010 and 2015, respectively.