Martin Vetterli | EPFL Graph Search

Martin Vetterli was appointed president of EPFL by the Federal Council following a selection process conducted by the ETH Board, which unanimously nominated him.

Professor Vetterli was born on 4 October 1957 in Solothurn and received his elementary and secondary education in Neuchâtel Canton. He earned a Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from ETH Zurich (ETHZ) in 1981, a Master’s of Science degree from Stanford University in 1982, and a PhD from EPFL in 1986. Professor Vetterli taught at Columbia University as an assistant and then associate professor. He was subsequently named full professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California at Berkeley before returning to EPFL as a full professor at the age of 38. He has also taught at ETHZ and Stanford University.

Professor Vetterli has earned numerous national and international awards for his research in electrical engineering, computer science and applied mathematics, including the National Latsis Prize in 1996. He is a fellow of both the Association for Computing Machinery and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and a member the US National Academy of Engineering. He has published over 170 articles and three reference works.

Professor Vetterli’s work on the theory of wavelets, which are used in signal processing, is considered to be of major importance by his peers, and his areas of expertise, including image and video compression and self-organized communication systems, are central to the development of new information technologies. As the founding director of the National Centre of Competence in Research on Mobile Information and Communication Systems, Professor Vetterli is a staunch advocate of transdisciplinary research.

Professor Vetterli knows EPFL inside and out. An EPFL graduate himself, he began been teaching at the school in 1995, was vice president for International Affairs and then Institutional Affairs from 2004 to 2011, and served as dean of the School of Computer and Communication Sciences in 2011 and 2012. In addition to his role as president of the National Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation, a position he held from 2013 to 2016, he heads the EPFL’s Audiovisual Communications Laboratory (LCAV) since 1995.

Professor Vetterli has supported more than 60 students in Switzerland and the United States in their doctoral work and makes a point of following their highly successful careers, whether it is in the academic or business world.

He is the author of some 50 patents, some of which were the basis for start-ups coming out of his lab, such as Dartfish and Illusonic, while others were sold (e.g. Qualcomm) as successful examples of technology transfer. He actively encourages young researchers to market the results of their work.

Asynchrony Increases Efficiency: Time Encoding of Videos and Low-Rank Signals

Karen Adam, Adam James Scholefield, Martin Vetterli

In event-based sensing, many sensors independently and asynchronously emit events when there is a change in their input. Event-based sensing can present significant improvements in power efficiency when compared to traditional sampling, because (1) the output is a stream of events where the important information lies in the timing of the events, and (2) the sensor can easily be controlled to output information only when interesting activity occurs at the input. Moreover, event-based sampling can often provide better resolution than standard uniform sampling. Not only does this occur because individual event-based sensors have higher temporal resolution (Rebecq et al., 2021) it also occurs because the asynchrony of events within a sensor and therefore across sensors allows for less redundant and more informative encoding. We would like to explain how such curious results come about. To do so, we use ideal time encoding machines as a proxy for event-based sensors. We explore time encoding of signals with low rank structure, and apply the resulting theory to video. We then see how the asynchronous firing across time encoding machines can couple spatial sampling density with temporal resolution, leading to better reconstruction, whereas, in frame-based video, temporal resolution depends solely on the frame-rate and spatial resolution solely on the pixel grid used.

IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC2022

Blind as a Bat: Audible Echolocation on Small Robots

Frederike Dümbgen, Adrien Guillaume Olivier Hoffet, Mihailo Kolundzija, Adam James Scholefield, Martin Vetterli

For safe and efficient operation, mobile robots need to perceive their environment, and in particular, perform tasks such as obstacle detection, localization, and mapping. Although robots are often equipped with microphones and speakers, the audio modality is rarely used for these tasks. Compared to the localization of sound sources, for which many practical solutions exist, algorithms for active echolocation are less developed and often rely on hardware requirements that are out of reach for small robots. We propose an end-to-end pipeline for sound-based localization and mapping that is targeted at, but not limited to, robots equipped with only simple buzzers and low-end microphones. The method is model-based, runs in real time, and requires no prior calibration or training. We successfully test the algorithm on the e-puck robot with its integrated audio hardware, and on the Crazyflie drone, for which we design a reproducible audio extension deck. We achieve centimeter-level wall localization on both platforms when the robots are static during the measurement process. Even in the more challenging setting of a flying drone, we can successfully localize walls, which we demonstrate in a proof-of-concept multi-wall localization and mapping demo.

2022

Interactive Digital Engagement With Visual Artworks and Cultural Artefacts Enhances User Aesthetic Experiences in the Laboratory and Museum

Loïc Arnaud Baboulaz, Pierre Gabioud, Christine Mohr, Martin Vetterli

Digital technologies reshape the way we interact with our environment, including with artworks. Advanced computational imaging solutions allow having extremely high-resolution digital reproductions of artworks outside museums, presumably increasing artwork engagement. We tested whether exploring such reproductions via an interactive interface heightened aesthetic appreciation and enhanced recognition. With this interface, observers can move, turn, zoom, and relight the digital reproductions (; ). In Study 1, 82 participants explored paintings in the laboratory. In Study 2, 63 participants explored precious cultural artefacts in the museum. In both studies, participants' aesthetic appreciation (interest, pleasure, intensity, subjective learning) was higher towards artworks they had explored interactively as compared to non-interactively or as physical objects, highlighting the advantage of the tested technology. However, we found no evidence that interactive exploration improved artwork recognition. More studies are needed to learn when and why digital interaction is beneficial above and beyond subjective aesthetic evaluations.

TAYLOR & FRANCIS INC2022