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Ramakrishna Vedantham

Senior Researcher
NRC Palo Alto

Background

Ramakrishna Vedantham is a Senior Researcher in the Spatial Technologies research team at Nokia Research Center (NRC) Palo Alto. 

His recent focus is on mobile augmented reality applications, computational photography and other computer vision based applications of cameraphones. In particular he is interested in building end-to-end systems for fast content based image retrieval from large collections (millions) of images. Some interesting applications that he is working on include mobile visual search for camera phones, and visual navigation service for GPS enabled phones. He is also interested in building systems for efficient processing of large collections of geo-referenced images and 3D data to enable novel mobile augmented reality services.

His prior research interests were in the general area of reliable multimedia transport and in particular error-resilient video coding, joint source-channel coding, advanced forward error correction coding (FEC) technologies and cross-layer optimization techniques for mobile multimedia communication.

Ramakrishna Vedantham joined NRC in January 2004. During 2004-2007, he participated in the research and standardization activities related to multimedia codecs and transport protocols at 3GPP and 3GPP2 forums. Prior to that he was a PhD student in the Dept of Electrical Engineering at the University of Texas at Dallas. He received an MS degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas at Dallas in December 2000, and a BTech in Electronics and Communications Enginnering from the National Institute of Technology Calicut (formerly Calicut Regional Engineering College) in 1996.

Professional Activities

  • IEEE Member, ACM Member
  • Session Chair: Image/Video Retreival, Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems and Computers, Pacific Grove, California, November, 2011 
  • Reviewer of IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications Journal, IET Image Processing Journal and the following conferences: ISIT 2011, ICDP 2009, ICC 2007, PV 2007, VIE 2006, MUM 2006, PIMRC 2006, ICIP 2004 and GlobeCom 2003
  • Nokia delegate in 3GPP SA4 and 3GPP2 TSG-C1.2 standards meetings during 2004-2007, Editor of 3GPP2 Technical Specification on BCMCS Codecs and Protocols

Conferences

          Try the Nokia Challenge on Visual Landmark Recognition

          2011 Call for Papers

Other Information

Awards & Honors

  • Best Student Paper Award (co-author), MUM 2008 Conference
  • TxTEC Scholarship, Texas Telecommunications Engineering Consortium, 08/2002-05/2003
  • ECS Special Fellowship, University of Texas at Dallas, 08/2000-05/2002

Publications

Journal Papers

  1. B. Girod, V. Chandrasekhar, D. M. Chen, N. M. Cheung, R. Grzeszczuk, Y. Reznik, G. Takacs, S. S. Tsai and R. Vedantham, “Mobile Visual Search”, Special Issue: Mobile Media Search, IEEE Signal Processing Magazine.
  2. H. Hile, R. Grzeszczuk, A. Liu, R. Vedantham, J. Kosecka, G. Borriello, "Visual Navigation for Mobile Devices", IEEE Multimedia (Special Issue on Mobile and Ubiquitous Media), April-June, 2010.

Conference Papers

  1. D. Chen, S. Tsai, V. Chandrasekhar, G. Takacs, H. Chen, R. Vedantham, R. Grzeszczuk, and B. Girod, "Residual enhanced visual vectors for on-device image matching", 45th Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers,  Pacific Grove, CA, November 2011
  2. S. Tsai, H. Chen, D. Chen, R. Vedantham, R. Grzezczuk, and B. Girod, "Mobile visual search using image and text features", 45th Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers, Pacific Grove, CA, November 2011
  3. D. Chen, G. Baatz, S. Tsai, K. Koser, R. Vedantham, T. Pylvanainen, K. Roimela, X. Chen, J. Bach, M. Pollefeys, B. Girod, R. Grzeszczuk, "City-Scale Landmark Identification on Mobile Devices", IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), Colorado Springs, Denver, June 2011
  4. V. Chandrasekhar, D. Chen, S. Tsai, N-M. Cheung, H. Chen, G. Takacs, Y. Reznik, R. Vedantham, R. Grzeszczuk, J. Bach, and B. Girod, "The Stanford mobile visual search dataset", ACM Multimedia Systems Conference (MMSys), San Jose, California, February 2011.
  5. V. Chandrasekhar, S. Tsai, G. Takacs, D. Chen, N-M. Cheung, Y. Reznik, R. Vedantham, R. Grzeszczuk, B. Girod, “Low Latency Image Retrieval with Progressive Transmission of CHoG Descriptors,” Proc. ACM Multimedia 2010, Florence, Italy, October 2010.
  6. S. Tsai, D. Chen, V. Chandrasekhar, G. Takacs, N-M. Cheung, R. Vedantham, R. Grzeszczuk, B. Girod, “Mobile Product Recognition,” Proc. ACM Multimedia 2010, Florence, Italy, October 2010
  7. S. Tsai, D. Chen, V. Chandrashekhar, G. Takacs, R. Vedantham, R. Grzeszczuk, B. Girod, “Fast Geometric Re-ranking for Image-based Retrieval,” Proc. IEEE International Conference on Image Processing, ICIP-10, Hong Kong, China, September 2010
  8. D. Chen, N-M. Cheung, S. Tsai, V. Chandrashekhar, G. Takacs, R. Vedantham, R. Grzeszczuk, B. Girod, “Dynamic Selection of a Feature-Rich Query Frame for Mobile Video Retrieval,” Proc. IEEE International Conference on Image Processing, ICIP-10, Hong Kong, China, September 2010. Accepted.
  9. T. Pylvanainen, K. Roimela, R. Vedantham, J. Itaranta, R. Wang, R. Grzeszczuk, "Automatic Alignment and Multi-View Segmentation of Street View Data using 3D Shape Priors", Fifth International Symposium on 3D Data Processing, Visualization and Transmission (3DPVT), Espace Saint Martin, Paris, France, May 17-20 2010.
  10. D. Chen, S. Tsai, R. Vedantham, R. Grzeszczuk, B. Girod, "Streaming Mobile Augmented Reality on Mobile Phones", 8th International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality, Orlando, Florida, October 19-22, 2009 (ISMAR 2009)
  11. R. Grzeszczuk, J. Kosecka, R. Vedantham, H. Hile, "Creating compact architectural models by geo-registering image collections", The 2009 IEEE International Workshop on 3-D Digital Imaging and Modeling (3DIM 2009), Kyoto, Japan, October 3-4, 2009 (held in conjunction with ICCV 2009)
  12. K. Pulli, W-C.Chen, N. Gelfand, R. Grzeszczuk, M. Tico, R. Vedantham, Y. Xiong, X. Wang, "Mobile Visual Computing", 7th International Symposium of Ubiquitous Virtual Reality (ISUVR 2009), Gwangju, South Korea, July 2009 (Invited paper).
  13. H. Hile, R. Grzeszczuk A. Liu, R. Vedantham, J. Kosecka, G. Borriello, "Landmark-Based Pedestrian Navigation with Enhanced Spatial Reasoning", The 7th International Conference on Pervasive Computing (Pervasive 2009), Nara, Japan, May 2009.
  14. H. Hile, R. Vedantham, A. Liu, G. Cuellar, N. Gelfand, R. Grzeszczuk, G. Borriello, "Landmark-Based Pedestrian Navigation from Collections of Geotagged Photos", (Best student paper), In Proceedings of ACM International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM 2008), Umea, Sweden, December 2008, ACM Press (2008)
  15. V. Setlur, T. Capin, S. Chitturi, R. Vedantham, M. Ingrassia, "MORE: Mobile Open Rich-media Environment", IEEE International Conference on Multimedia & Expo (ICME), Toronto, Canada, July 2006
  16. V. Suryavanshi, A. Nosratinia, R. Vedantham, "Resilient Packet Header Compression Through Coding",  IEEE Global Communication Conference, Dallas, TX, November 2004.
  17. R. Vedantham, A. Nosratinia, "Video Error Resilience through Efficient Shadowing of Decoder", 41st Annual Allerton Conference on Communications Control and Computing.

Co-author of several technical contributions to 3GPP SA4 and 3GPP2 TSG-C1.2 meetings in the areas of mobile multimedia broadcast/multicast, rich media transport, and interactive multimedia sharing applications

Book Chapters

  1. R. Vedantham, I. Curcio, "Interactive Mobile TV Technologies - An Overview", Book chapter in "Broadband Mobile Multimedia - Techniques and applications", CRC Press, 2008.
  2. R. Vedantham, I. Curcio, "Broadcasting Multimedia Transport: 3G and Future Mobile Networks ", Book chapter in "Encyclopedia of Wireless and Mobile Communications", CRC Press, 2007.

    Presentations

    Posters & Demos
    1. Nokia City Scene Demo, ISMAR 2011 Workshop: Enabling Large-Scale Outdoor Mixed Reality and Augmented Reality, Basel, Switzerland, October 2011.
    2. S. Tsai, D. Chen, V. Chandrasekhar, G. Takacs, N-M. Cheung, R. Vedantham, R. Grzeszczuk, B. Girod, “Mobile Product Recognition,”Proc. ACM Multimedia 2010, Florence, Italy, October 2010.
    3. G. Takacs, S. Tsai, R. Grzeszczuk, R. Vedantham, B. Girod, "Unified Tracking and Recognition with Rotation-Invariant Fast Features,  The Twenty-Third IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2010), San Francisco, California, June 2010. 
    4. D. Chen, S. Tsai, V. Chandrasekhar, G. Takacs, R. Vedantham, R. Grzeszczuk, B. Girod, “Inverted Index Compression for Scalable Image Matching,”  Proc. IEEE Data Compression Conf. (DCC), Snowbird, UT, Mar. 2010.
    5. D. Chen, S. Tsai, R. Vedantham, R. Grzeszczuk, B. Girod, "Streaming Mobile Augmented Reality on Mobile Phones", 8th International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality, Orlando, Florida, October 19-22, 2009 (ISMAR 2009)
    6. H. Hile, R. Grzeszczuk, R. Vedantham, J. Kosecka, A. Liu, G. Borriello, "Augmenting Images with Context on Mobile Devices", The 7th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services (Mobisys 2009), Krakow, Poland, June 2009.
    7. H. Hile, R. Vedantham, A. Liu, G. Cuellar, N. Gelfand, R. Grzeszczuk, G. Borriello, K. Pulli, "Landmark Based Pedestrian Navigation", 7th IEEE and ACM International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR 2008), Cambridge, UK, September 2008.
    8. R. Vedantham, A. Nosratinia, "Low bit rate video transmission over wireless channels", , 4th Annual TxTEC Conference, Arlington, TX, January 2003.

    Patents

    8 granted US patents and several pending patent applications in the areas of reliable multimedia delivery over mobilebroadcast/multicast networks, rich media transport, and interactive multimedia sharing applications