Introduction | Career Opportunities | Illustrative Example

Today, you can buy palm-sized organisers for $250 that link to computers, transmit data, and store thousands of addresses, appointments, memos, lists, and e-mails. The keys to this stunning revolution in personal power are the transistor and the integrated circuit -- the centrepieces of the modern electronics systems that swept the world in the last half of the 20th century.

Where will microchips appear next? They might appear on the front of refrigerators to monitor food supplies and send grocery lists to the store, automatically charging credit cards or bank accounts. Or they could be implanted in children to prevent kidnapping, or inside the human brain to cure blindness or other medical conditions. The technology is limitless. Only imagination will govern its potential.

SIGMEDIA - Signal Processing and Media Applications Team
The act of extracting useful information from sometimes poor data is usually called "Signal processing". This area has devloped rapidly in the last 25 years because of the rise of the comsumer PC. Products like DVD Players, Digital television, CD Players and even the automobile, rely on basic signal processing ideas for their operation.

In DVD and Digital Multimedia players in general, the data is stored in compressed format in order to allow an entire movie to fit onto the limited space available. It is amazing to think that just 10 years ago, the elements of the MPEG video compression standard like Motion tracking, were just ideas in research laboratories spread around the world. Signal processing in automobiles is used for cancelling the noise from the engine and automated engine tuning, for instance.

Daimler-Chrysler used video analysis to track air flows inside the cabin and evaluate the effect of window shape and temperature on that "draught of air" that exists between the driver's shoulder and the window. Image and Video processing is a very interesting area in Signal processing, and the group in the Electronics and Electrical Engineering Department, "The Signal processing and media applications group" has been involved in a wide variety of projects. The demonstrations below show what could be achieved through some simple mathematical interpretation of video data.
http://www.mee.tcd.ie/~sigmedia

Some Examples of Signal Processing
Sport Video Retrieval and Indexing >>
Automatic Digital Film Restoration >>
Shot Cut Detection >>