Purdue ECE undergraduate student awarded Outstanding First Time Research at SURF
An undergraduate student in the Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering won the Outstanding First Time Researcher award at the 2022 Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) program. Akshat Bisht is a student in Prof. Stanley Chan’s Intelligent Imaging Lab (i2Lab). For SURF, he built a real-time Jetson demo to simulate and process 1-bit signals from a live camera feed. Prof. Chan is the PI on the project.
The project, entitled “Applying Quanta Image Sensors to Real-World Imaging,” focuses on the standard CMOS Image Sensors (CIS), which has become the most prevalent image sensor among personal computing devices. It is found in phones, laptops and nearly all modern digital cameras. CMOS sensors have a high read noise making it difficult to extract details from scenes with low-light. Quanta image sensors (QIS) are a suite of photon-counting sensors that have a low read noise and strive to solve this problem. QIS sensors oversample binary frames creating large amounts of data which allows for high quality image reconstruction in low-light settings. However, this results in large data throughput on the order of tens of terabits per second. In order for QIS technology to be widely adopted in real-world imaging it must be computationally efficient to run on an edge device in real time. By selecting specific algorithms to run in parallel the computational complexity can be reduced, making it possible for QIS to generate a video feed. The contributions of this project include the use of a customized image processing pipeline using non-iterative image reconstruction and de-noising on an NVIDIA Jetson with the CUDA platform to operate a live feed demonstrating QIS in the real-world on an edge device.
The SURF program provides an action-oriented research experience for undergraduate students to stimulate their interest in advanced education and research careers. Selected students engage in research this summer on Purdue's West Lafayette campus. SURF matches undergraduates with a faculty member and graduate student mentor who introduce them to the research tools used on the cutting edges of science, engineering, and technology.
This competitive fellowship is a paid, 10-week, immersive summer research guided by the faculty and graduate student mentors. In addition to research activities, students participate in weekly professional development workshops. The program culminates with a student research symposium where all fellows present a technical poster or an oral talk. All participants are required to produce a final report submitted to the PI and the Engineering Undergraduate Research Office (EURO) to document their outcomes.