INESC TEC organises the first international conference on HDR imaging

INESC TEC organised and hosted the HDRi 2013: First International Conference and SME Workshop on HDR Imaging, an event dedicated exclusively to imaging techniques used to generate, edit and display High Dynamic Range images.  For two days, researchers and practitioners from several countries discussed issues associated with techniques to capture and process HDR, as well as the most recent developments and the future of this revolutionary technology that is now emerging.

Lectures, debates and demonstrations during the two-day conference

Traditional imaging techniques are still not capable of capturing or displaying with precision the vast range of colours and light intensity (shadows) in the real world. High Dynamic Range imaging technologies are the exception. HDR can capture and process different lighting stages with accuracy and provide a significantly improved visualisation experience, making it possible, for instance, to clearly see a car going in and out of a tunnel.  

Other than lectures, debates and demonstrations on the theme, the event also featured presentations from keynote speakers Peter Shirley, from NVIDIA (a company that develops processors and computer graphics) and Alessandro Rizzi, from the Universitá degli Studi di Milano, Italy. Several papers with significant contributions to the area were also presented, and the Best Paper Award was given to the paper “False color visualization for HDR images”, by Ahmet Ouz Akyüz, from the Middle East Technical University, Turkey.

This event took place as part of the project/research network “COST ACTION IC1005 HDRi: The digital capture, storage, transmission and display of real-world lighting”. The event was organised by the following researchers at INESC TEC’s Information and Computer Graphics Systems Unit (USIG): Maximino Bessa (a professor at the University of Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro, UTAD) and A. Augusto de Sousa (a professor at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto, FEUP).

Gender imbalance session to raise awareness for research career

Following European recommendations to fight the so-called gender imbalance, a lecture was also organised as part of the project meeting of the “COST ACTION IC1005” that was specifically for female high school or university students. At the sessions, participants had the opportunity to hear two researchers, Beatriz Sousa Santos (a senior researcher who also teaches at the University of Aveiro) and Diana Carvalho (junior researcher and PhD student at UTAD), and to understand their motivations to pursue a research career in Computer Engineering.