|
|  |
 |
| |
|
| |
- Principles and Applications
- Research activities integrate two themes, (i) advancing the underlying principles that define systems and components and (ii) demonstrating the application of principles to practice. Research within the ECE Department contributes to both of these basic themes.
- Increasingly, applications integrate a variety of themes drawn from both principles and practices, combining concepts from specific fields to create a contemporary, competitive product. The research thrusts of the ECE Department draws on the overlap of each faculty members's interests and expertise in multiple thrusts, creating a team-based infrastructure of researchers seeking to advance the principles and practices enabling today's complex systems.
|
|
Primary Research Thrust Areas
|
- Signal Processing
- Signal processing covers a wide variety of topics, including signal generation, transmission, transformation,detection, extraction and analysis. The emphasis is on digital signal processing principles and applications.
- Embedded, Real-Time, Intelligent Microelectronic Systems
- Embedded systems integrate principles from across the many fields of electrical and computer engineering to create self-contained systems that can be embedded in a wide range of applications. A current emphasis is on autonomous mobile robot systems.
|
- Visual and Multimedia Information Systems
- Multimedia represents the combination of several sensory information data types (video, image, audio, speech) along with general data files. A current emphasis is on visual information, placing particularly challenging requirements on system performance and sophistication.
- Networked Information Systems & Applications
- This theme represents a "system of subsystems," with the network an integral subsystem enabling the other subsystems to interact with one another. Current themes include reliable, secure networks, sensor arrays, network protocols, and other topics highlighting the integration of the overall system.
|
ECE Research Application Areas
Application areas provide a testing ground for the practicality and performance of new principles and techniques. Representative targetted applications of ECE projects include the following.
|
- Wireless transceivers
- Extraction of data from the broadband electromagetic signal received from the antenna of a wireless transceiver applies advanced signal processing techniques to separate desired channels from other channels and backbround noise. Generation of transmitted signals seeks to create an end-to-end capability with increased reliability and data rate per channel.
- Ad hoc wireless networks
- This application envisions collections of mobile wireless nodes collectively self-organizing and cooperating to set up an efficient communications infrastructure among the nodes, along with group connection to external networks.
- Autonomous mobile robotics
- Research explores the integrated set of features through which one or more autonomous robots can determine their environment and explore areas without external intervention. These robot systems can include various sensor/transducer components to allow the robot to interact with its physical surroundings as it explores an area.
- Telemedicine & Wireless Networks
- Telemedicine networks allow physicians and other medical personnel to acquire information from re
mote sites and to conduct interviews, consultations, and other activities. Health records impose serious requirements on security during transmission. This work explores the application of wireless networks in the service of health care professionals.
- Image understanding
- The traditional themes of image processing have established powerful techniques to transform images, compare images to objects, and perform other basic actions. Image understanding extends these techniques to include higher level ways of understanding the contents of images and to extract information from those images.
|
- Information hiding
- A variety of techniques seek to embed information within an image without creating any apparent changes in the viewed image. Simple techniques setting lowest order bits to the desired hidden data have evolved into sophisticated techniques to provide security and robustness against detection.
- Secure wireless communications
- Wireless communications suffers from a serious security problem since any receiver in the general region can, without detection, receive and extract the transmitted data. Simple encryption techniques fail to provide needed security and more sophisticated techniques are under investigation. ECE research in this topic supplements and contributes to the research of WiNSeC, the Wireless Network Security Center, at Stevens.
- Reliable and efficient transmission of multimedia information
- Multimedia information such as images and video contain large amounts of raw data. Various compression schemes remove redundancy through sophisticated algorithms to achieve a dramatic reduction in the amount of data that needs to be transmitted to recover the original information. Minor errors can greatly corrupt the remote recovery of the information. Innovative techniques are being developed for sufficient QoS in the recovered image despite minor errors (or major lost data) during transmission.
- Cross-layer protocols for networks
- The formal protocols used by data networks are in the form of independently acting layers of actions. This independence seriously limits several approaches to create more secure and reliable networks in the future. The "cross-layer" theme explores interdependence among the layers, as opposed to the current independence of the layers.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
Print
