Jinwei Ye, Assistant Professor, Computer Science, received funding from the National Science Foundation for the project: "Collaborative Research: RI: Small: Motion Field Understanding for Enhanced Long-Range Imaging."
Ye is collaborating with Nianyi Li, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Clemson University, and Suren Jayasuriya, Assistant Professor, Arts Media and Engineering, and Assistant Professor, School of Electrical, Energy and Computer Engineering, at Arizona State University.
As part of this project, Ye and his collaborators will develop computational solutions to decouple the entangled motion fields and use turbulence motion to enhance visual computing applications in long-range imaging. This research is motivated by the observation that turbulence-induced motion fields can provide depth and sub-pixel color information, which are crucial in restoring scenes with high-frequency details.
To achieve this goal, the researchers will pursue three research thrusts: 1) neural field decoupling of object and turbulence motion; 2) reconstructing turbulence strength and flows from passive visual imagery, and 3) motion field guided intelligent foveation for long-range imaging.
The first thrust will develop algorithms for estimating and recovering motion fields with both object and turbulence motion by investigating physics-based velocity fields.
The second thrust will develop tractable quantitative turbulence motion models that can be applied to both air and water environments using deep neural networks.
The third thrust will integrate the turbulence motion field into different visual computing pipelines to benefit long-range computer vision tasks.
This project will collect a large motion field dataset with true turbulent parameters of different media types and turbulence strengths, which can facilitate the development of data-driven machine learning algorithms for long-range computer vision.
Regarding the importance of this research, Ye said, "This project will develop vision systems for aerial vehicles to allow long-range imaging with high quality. This could benefit applications in navigation, detection and tracking, and long-range monitoring."
Ye received $149,572 from NSF for this research. Funding began in April 2023 and will end in late March 2026.
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