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EECS 510 - Human Perception and Electronic Media
COURSE TITLE: EECS 510 Human Perception and Electronic Media

CATALOG DESCRIPTION: Fundamentals of visual, acoustic, and tactile
perception; display devices; perceptual models for image, video,
acoustic, and tactile signal analysis, compression, quality
evaluation, and understanding; multimodal signal processing and
perception; content-based retrieval; sense substitution.

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COURSE DIRECTOR: Thrasyvoulos N. Pappas

COURSE GOALS: To provide a thorough background in the fundamental
principles and techniques in digital media processing, analysis,
and compression, and how they relate, on the one hand, to acquisition
and display devices, and on the other, to human perception.
Overview of the current technologies and standards, and directions for
future research.

PREREQUISITES BY COURSES: EECS 359 or equivalent or permission of the instructor.

DETAILED COURSE TOPICS:

- Visual Imaging and Perception

 + Basics of the human visual system
 + Perceptual effects and illusions

 + Multiscale decompositions
 + Subband analysis and wavelets
 + Markov random fields

 + Perceptual quality metrics
 + Structural similarity metrics
 + Quality evaluation for scalable compression

 + Perceptually lossless compression
 + Structurally lossless compression
 + Bilevel image compression
 + Incremental parsing

 + Color processing and perception
 + Texture analysis and synthesis
 + Shape

 + Adaptive clustering
 + Perceptual color-texture segmentation
 + Spatio-temporal segmentation
 + Background subtraction
 + Joint segmentation and motion estimation
 + Semantic classification and retrieval

 + Digital image halftoning

- Acoustic Perception

 + Distortion Measures
 + Perceptually lossless compression
 + Objective and subjective evaluation of loudness,
   sharpness, and roughness

- Tactile Display and Perception

 + Fundamentals of human tactile perception
 + Haptic perception of real and synthetic materials
 + Tactile dimensions: roughness, regularity, directionality
 + Tactile devices
 + Signal processing for tactile display

- Multimodal Processing and Perception

 + Roughness in sound and vision
 + Joint perception of visual, acoustic, and tactile signals


PROJECT: A bibliographical search or computer type project is
required.  The purpose of this project is to enhance the understanding
of a topic covered in class or to investigate a topic not covered in
class.  A final written report and a presentation are required.

GRADES: Homework - 20%
  Class participation - 20%
      Project - 60%

COURSE OBJECTIVES: When a student completes this course, s/he should
be able to:
1. Understand the fundamentals of visual, acoustic, and tactile
 perception.
2. Have a basic understanding of display devices and their models.
3. Understand perceptual models for image, video, acoustic, and
 tactile signal analysis, with applications to compression, quality
 evaluation, retrieval, and understanding.
4. Understand the basics of multi-modal perception, interaction, and
 sense substitution.
5. Apply the acquired knowledge to specific electronic media applications.
6. Be prepared for advanced research or development in this area.
Northwestern University Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department