Strong presence by RIT faculty and alumni at Imaging Science symposium

The Society for Imaging Science and Technology (IS&T) International Symposium on Electronic Imaging (EI) 2020 featured multiple speakers from the Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science at RIT.

Besides the many speakers, the Food and Agricultural Imaging Systems (FAIS) became established as a new conference which was organized by former RIT Imaging Science Ph.D. students Mustafa Jaber (2012), Grigorios Tsagkatakis (2011), and Mohammed Yousefhussien (2019).

The original idea for this new conference came about when Mustafa Jaber was in discussion with IS&T Executive Director, Suzanne E. Grinnan. Suzanne is leading the Frontiers in Imaging initiative to help introduce new topics to the IS&T and EI community. Dr. Mustafa Jaber is a computer vision engineer at NantOmics LCC. in Culver City, where he performs research and development work in the area of deep learning and machine vision.

The conference hosted an afternoon session that included six oral presentations on innovative imaging systems, computer vision, machine/deep learning research focusing on applications in food and agriculture. Presentations discussed topics related to fruits and fruit freshness, color analysis of tomatoes using the smartphone’s camera, cattle identification, and food safety. Researchers from academia and industry coming from Greece, Japan, South Africa, the State of Palestine, and the United States presented and attended the conference.

RIT Presenters

Katherine Carpenter (color science Ph.D.) presented her work on ‘Smartphone Imaging for Color Analysis of Tomatoes.’

Ayush Soni (computer science MS) presented work entitled, ‘High-quality Multispectral Image Generation using Conditional GANs.’

Tejaswini Ananthanarayana (computer engineering Ph.D.) presented her paper on ‘Deep Learning-based Fruit Freshness Classification and Detection with CMOS Image Sensors and Edge Processors.’

Bryan Blakeslee (computer engineering) along with his advisor Andreas Savakis, received a Best Paper Award for their work on ‘LambdaNet: A fully Convolutional Architecture for Directional Change Detection.’

Keynote Speakers

The two keynote speakers for the conference included Dr. Jan van Aardt from RIT and Mr. Kevin Lang, General Manager of PrecisionHawk.

Dr. van Aardt gave a comprehensive talk about “Managing crops across spatial and temporal scales — the roles of UAS and satellite remote sensing,” and Mr. Lang spoke on 'Practical applications and trends for UAV remote sensing in agriculture.'

Plans for 2020

The FAIS conference plan for 2020 is to develop dedicated sessions on machine learning and computer vision applications in food and agriculture, imaging systems for food and agriculture capture, color science in food and agriculture, and adding another track for food photography.