Electronic Imaging 2009 New SPIE Fellows

Wednesday, January 21 in San Jose we recognized three of SPIE’s newly promoted Fellows for 2009 who have made great contributions to the Electronic Imaging community and to this meeting. The 2009 Fellows Committee, chaired by James Harrington has selected 59 new Fellows of the Society, which were approved by the SPIE Board of Directors. Fellows are members of distinction who have made significant scientific and technical contributions in the fields of optics, photonics, and imaging. The annual recognition of Fellows provides an opportunity for us to acknowledge outstanding members for their service to the general optics community.

The first was Mr. John O. Merritt of The Merritt Group. Mr. Merritt's fellow promotion is for specific research and achievements in the areas of Stereoscopic Displays and Applications. His contributions include the advancement of 3D imaging in film-making, the development of a "Rapid Sequential Positioning" task used for evaluation testing and "gravity-referenced" video displays for the Navy teleoperated vehicle.

Second was Dr. Bernice E. Rogowitz of The IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. Dr. Rogowitz's fellow promotion is for specific achievements in human vision applications in electronic imaging. She has been a leader in research in perceptual areas relevant to imagingand visualization systems, in developing interactive software systems based on her deep understanding of these issues, and building a community linking the engineering and human vision communities.

Least but not last, was Prof. Shoji Tominaga of Chiba University, Japan. Prof. Tominaga's fellow promotion is for specific achievements in electronic imaging. His significant research includes analysis of the surface-spectral reflectance functions of inhomogeneous dielectric, work on the problem of estimating the three-dimensional scattering of light from a surface, and studies on imaging systems and algorithms for realizing human color constancy, predicting color appearance, and recognizing objects.

These Fellows join a prestigious list of more than 550 SPIE members so honored for their contribution to the discipline since the Society’s inception in 1955.

Research in Color Science: Next Challenges

In the Ninties, when I still had sap flowing in my veins and had the energy to pursue a hobby of scientific research, I was organizing events like the color conference at the IS&T/SPIE Electronic Imaging (EI) symposium in San Jose every January.

One of the features was a Wednesday evening panel discussion on the future in our field. The panel members were the most influential movers and shakers in industry and academia, and the extremely skilled moderator was always A. John Michaelis.

Topics included titles like Where will electronic publishing lead us?, What aspects of electronic imaging limit the digital publishing revolution?, and Communicating with computers: How long can the keyboard and mouse survive? What comes next? Those panel discussions used to be very hot and had impact.

For example, at the one in 1998, somebody in the audience protested that we were using the term electronic publishing but that was not what we were talking about. The argument was that electronic publishing referred to the use of electronic technology to do publishing with the old mechanical workflow. Instead, we were discussing a radically different set of workflows, so we should coin a new name, like digital publishing.

This just came out spontaneously in the heat of a very animated discussion. It was followed by a few seconds of total silence, but then the name stuck.

Well, in reality it took a couple of years and I had to organize a conference called Digital Publishing to make it stick, but now this term is generally used since then.

With this background, I was very moved to learn that this year at EI the color conference has introduced a session called The Dark Side of Color taking place at the end of Wednesday afternoon.

Alas, as a little engineer working in the trenches, I am not able to attend EI. However, when Mohamed cannot go to the mountain, the mountain will go to Mohamed. In fact, we can simply organize an old style panel discussion post-EI here in Palo Alto. This way it is not a conference and it does not require travel.

So if Friday January 23, 2009 you are in the vicinity, please drop in at 1501 Page Mill Road at HP Labs from 3 to 5 in the afternoon. Some luminaries like Jan Allebach, Jennifer Gille, Gabriel Marcu, John McCann, Michael Kriss, Carinna Parraman, Alessandro Rizzi, Gaurav Sharma, and Sabine Süsstrunk have already signed up to be on the panel. It will be an open event with nothing to sign, but since we do not have an auditorium with an external door, you can get in faster if you email me before and I can have a visitor badge ready for you.

The panel discussion topic is Research in Color Science: Next Challenges and will take place Friday January 23 in the Sigma conference room from 3 pm on. I hope you can make it.

A quantum imager for intensity correlated photons

Yesterday our paper A quantum imager for intensity correlated photons was published in the New Journal of Physics. NJP is published by the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft and the Institute of Physics. The link to the paper is http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/1367-2630/11/1/013001, where you find this abstract:

We report on a device capable of imaging second-order spatio-temporal correlations g⁽²⁾(x, τ) between photons. The imager is based on a monolithic array of single-photon avalanche diodes (SPADs) implemented in CMOS technology and a simple algorithm to treat multiphoton time-of-arrival distributions from different SPAD pairs. It is capable of 80 ps temporal resolution with fluxes as low as 10 photons s⁻¹ at room temperature. An important application might be the local imaging of g⁽²⁾ as a means of confirming the presence of true Bose–Einstein macroscopic coherence (BEC) of cavity exciton polaritons.

Today's color is orange

In my recent post on ephemerality of color names I wrote how these days オレンジ (orenji) is more frequent than 橙 (ダイダイ, daidai). Well, there is an exception — today's color is daidai, which is also the pronounciation for 代代, which is translated as for generations, hereditary, generation after generation.

With this linguistic game, today's color is orange and in Japan today people have offered mirror rice cakes (鏡餅, かがみもち) at their home altars, where the mirror's face is made out of a bitter orange.

Read all about it on Wikipedia's entry on kagami mochi.

今年も　どうぞ　宜しくお願いします