Electronics and Informatics (ETRO)

In 2004 a special type of government funding gave birth to the Industrial Research Fund (IOF – Industrieel Onderzoeksfonds).

This funding supports the IOF knowledge centers at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in carrying out outstanding strategic research and further developing new application-oriented inventions with economic potential. The first priority of the IOF funds is the further establishment of a portfolio of potentially applicable and transferable know-how with economic and societal value.

Keywords

Micro-electronics
Opto-electronics
Millimeter and THz waves
Analog circuit design
Living systems
Multidimensional signal processing
Image reconstruction
Inverse problems
Data visualization
Image & video coding
Multimedia forensics
System complexity and power consumption
Embedded systems
Computer architectures
Communication networks
Image processing
Computer vision
Medical and biological imaging
e-Health
Personalized health systems
Speech processing
Audio processing
Audiovisual signal processing
Multimedia representation

Main objectives

Crossing boundaries with visionary electronics & ICT
Staying ahead of the obvious R&D tendencies
Creating impact on the transformation processes of the knowledge society
Finding inspiration in the unexplored engineering bottleneck at the interface of various application domains
Participating in various application value chains through collaboration with industry, public services, and hospitals
Developing a generic R&D background applicable in diverse sectors (e.g. health care, automotive, media, surveillance, security, public safety, remote sensing, energy, telecommunications, content industry, creative industries, …)

Collaborating between the 3 research groups:

Microelectronics (LAMI), Multidimensional signal
processing and communication (IRIS) and Digital Speech
and Audio Processing (DSSP)

leads to ...

making sense of audio, video, hyper-dimensional signals & sensors for various sectors
delivering unique value through multi-disciplinary engineering and through demand-driven and fundamental research beyond mainstream

Multidisciplinary strategic and applied research

Area 1: Combined physical image generation and image processing for superior imaging systems (LAMI and IRIS)

2D/3D imaging & 3D cameras
mm-wave & THz sensing

Area 2: Audiovisual signal processing for man-machine communication (IRIS & DSSP)

Audiovisual interaction in multimodal communications
Audiovisual emotion and gesture analysis & synthesis
Source localization and tracking in audiovisual scenes

Area 3: ICT Systems and applications based on wired/wireless communication on broadband networks and adhoc sensor
networks (IRIS)

Digital watermarking for quality testing and content filtering
3D visualization and coding
Wireless communication and applications

Potentially applicable and transferable know how with economic value

Broad scale of 2D/3D imaging HW/SW expertise
Fundamentally new insights into using mm-waves to scan objects
Medical imaging and analysis expertise, e.g. in dental imagery, mammogram analysis, multimodal data fusion for various applications
e-Health: personalized health systems, e.g. interpretation of behavioral and physiological characteristics of monitored senior citizens at home
Audiovisual signal processing expertise
- Automatic dialogue replacement
- Audio-visual text-to-speech synthesis
- Audio-visual mental state estimation
Unique video codec technology, e.g. using block-motion estimation techniques (OBMEC)
A comprehensive encoder and decoder implementation of the JPEG 2000 part 1 (Core coding system) and part 10 (JP3D, coding of volumetric data) standards
Improved laser modulator design based on a patented Transverse Laser Mode Switching principle

Equipment & Infrastructure

A state-of-the-art audiovisual recording studio (Nosey Elephant Studio)
Four measurement labs:
- 3D-lab: 2D and 3D camera calibration
- AVLab, an experimental audiovisual lab
- VQT-Lab, visual quality testing such as performed for the JPEG XR standardization
- Lab equipped with unique quasi-optical vector network analyzer, operating in the 40 to 660 GHz range, with extension potential up to 2 THz
iBrussels Living Lab: a Campus-wide test bench for the development of applications and services based on wireless communication technology, including technology and user studies.

Research collaboration

More than 50 academic cooperation agreements spread over 25 countries
Joint laboratory with :
NWPU in Xi’an (China) on AudioVisual Signal Processing (AVSP)
an UZ antenna in the University Hospital Brussel
an interfaculty research group on Computational Mathematics (CAMP)
Network of more than 100 Industrial partners :
Alcatel Bell
Barco
IBM
Agfa
Microsoft
Philips
Siemens
Televic
Close cooperation with various Belgian research centers and institutes (we are an associated lab of IMEC, we are co-founder and partner in IBBT and INTEL’s Exascience Lab, and we collaborate with many other R&D institutes, competence poles and strategic research centers, ...)
Joint research with various departments at the VUB
APNA
CGIS
DINF
HYDR
MECH
SMIT
Cooperation with all the major Belgian universities :
UCL
UGent
ULB
UA
KUL
LUC
Active in various networks and standardization committees :
BELASNET
IEE
IET
JPEG
MPEG
SPIE
NEWFOCUS
DSP Valley
ITU-T
Agoria
ISO/IEC
JTC1/SC29

ETRO spin-offs

Optrima NV - leader in hardware for 3D gesture interfaces
Eqcologic - equalizers for communication, low power and general-purpose integrated circuits
Universum Digitalis (UD) - customized solutions for data management and distribution

Vrije Universiteit Brussel - ETRO Faculty of Engineering
Pleinlaan 2 – B-1050 Brussels – Belgium
[W] www.etro.vub.ac.be
[T secr] +32 (0)2 629 29 30
Head: Roger VOUNCKX (ETRO)
Jan CORNELIS (IOF)
[E] rvounckx@etro.vub.ac.be
jpcornel@etro.vub.ac.be
[T] +32 (0)2 629 29 63
+32 (0)2 629 29 30
[Mobile] +32 (0)486 79 54 03
+32 (0)476 24 56 56
GROUP ETRO: 101 full time team members