Visual Information Processing (VIP) Laboratory

The VIP Laboratory belongs to the Information and Data Sciences (IDS) group in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Boston University.  Its three main objectives are sponsored research,  student training and technology transfer, in the broad area of visual information processing. It has been home to graduate and undergraduate students working on various projects, including visual surveillance, human-computer interfaces, 3-D video capture, representation and display, as well as biomedical image processing.

The most recent research thrust focuses on accurate indoor occupancy sensing in large spaces using overhead fisheye cameras. Our system, COSSY, achieves 90-95% people-count accuracy in spaces of thousands of square feet by means of multi-camera AI, and is a unique solution for spatial analytics/space management (by monitoring where people are), HVAC energy reduction (by adjusting air flow based on occupancy level) and emergency response (by helping first responders localize people). This work has been recently featured in a College of Engineering article and another one published by The Brink.

Other projects in the past have focused on the development of next-generation user authentication methods based on gestures of the hand, arm or even the whole body. The advantage of such authentication over a fingerprint or iris scan is that once such a scan is compromised it cannot be recovered, whereas a gesture can be changed. More details about the motivation for this work can be found in a BU Today article and video. For research results, please see Projects/HCIs page (BodyLogin, HandLogin, DeepLogin).