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Stanford's faculty include Nobel prize winners and other internationally recognized leaders from many disciplines. We will periodically spotlight different faculty teaching Stanford courses offered through SCPD, to give you a closer look at our extraordinary intellectual community.
Practicing engineers have a new opportunity this winter: EE398A: Image Communication I is the first in a new two-course series that expands on the principles and systems formerly covered in EE368B Image and Video Compression. Professor Bernd Girod, a pioneer in video compression and media streaming technology, will teach the courses. Girod holds about 20 international patents, has published extensively, and was elected Fellow of the IEEE in 1998 for his "contributions to the theory and practice of video communications."
Girod is enthusiastic about developing and teaching both courses. "The two-part series explores image communication issues in more breadth and depth," he says. "We will cover in greater detail the most important systems that use still image and video compression." As Girod points out, the course curriculum is relevant to virtually every form of visual communication: digital still photography, broadcast television, DVD, video streaming, video conferencing, etc. "Students may take the first course without the second, but they must complete EE398A to go on with EE398B. The fundamentals we explore in the first course are essential to succeed in the second."
Building on the Fundamentals: Still Images to Video
EE398A covers principles and systems for digital image communication, emphasizing source coding for efficient storage and transmission of both still and moving images. In particular, this first course covers still image communication techniques including: image acquisition and sampling, color systems, lossless coding principles; arithmetic, run-length, and facsimile coding; extension to multilevel images; lossless and lossy predictive coding; DPCM; mltiresolution coding, subband coding and wavelets; EZW and SPIHT coding; limits of human visual perception; and image quality measures.
"The course will be a combination of lectures and hands-on homework assignments," says Girod. "Students will write algorithms for image compression in Matlab. A significant class project will be central to EE398B this spring when we focus on video communication."
Ideal for Practicing Engineers
Girod looks forward to the mix of on-campus and distance students in the EE398 courses. Though this is just his third year as full-time faculty at Stanford, he is not new to teaching to distance students. "When I was on Sabbatical at Stanford in 1997, I taught a graduate course which was broadcast through SCPD," says Girod. "It was satisfying to have almost as many distance students as on-campus students because the topic is so highly relevant to the industry. People have immediate use for the course in their practical work."
The 1997 sabbatical sparked what Girod calls his "love affair with Stanford," and when offered a professorship there the following year, he jumped. "The quality of the students and faculty is fantastic, which makes working here a great joy."
For more about Girod, visit http://www.stanford.edu/~bgirod/.
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