TFE, Umea University, Sweden

Biography: Associate Professor Dr. Ulrik Söderström received a Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering with a specialization in Signal Processing from Umea University in Umea, Sweden in November 2008. After his PH.D. degree, he worked as an Assistant Professor at TFE, Umea University for two years before becoming an Associate Professor at the same department in Umeå.
Söderström has been an assistant supervisor to two students until their Licentiate Degree and he has supervised one student leading up to a PhD degree in 2015. He worked within an EU project called INTRO, which was a 4-year, EU funded Initial Training Network (ITN) in the Marie-Curie People Programme (FP7). Söderström has also been a reviewer for several conferences and journals and he has published more than 30 peer-review articles.
Professor Soderstrom’s research is mainly focused on face image processing. Among other things, he has worked with video compression of head-and-shoulder sequences, face recognition, removal of occlusions in human faces and super-resolution versions of face images.
Dr. Söderström is a member of the IEEE.

Speech Title: Very low bitrate video encoding for telecommunication
Abstract: High-speed connections are often available at most locations where a user finds oneself and the expectancy for such connections are often high. A discrepancy between the users’ expectation and the available connection speed often occurs when there are several users in a small area or when the infrastructure for high-speed connections is not available. However, even when such high-speed connections are available the use of video communication is not as widespread as previously anticipated. The cause of this is not a single issue, e.g. the connection bandwidth. Another issue is the user-friendliness of video communication where hands-free use usually are not available. With our approach to video compression, we try to address both of these issues at once.
Firstly, it is possible to use information from the side view, or even the profile, of a face for encoding while the decoded video still depicts the frontal face. A wide-angle lens camera positioned on the side of a face can solve this and thus provide hands-free video communication.
Secondly, the video compression has a very low bitrate need for transmission of video information. It is possible to decode high-quality video from just a few bits since the decoding resolution is not dependent on the transmission bitrate. This allows the use of high quality video communication even over networks with a low bitrate, e.g. GSM networks.
The aim for this video compression technique is thus to provide user-friendly communication. With user-friendly we mean ease of use at low bitrates, avoiding buffering and delays due to bandwidth problems and with the possibility of hands-free usage.