Mohamed A. Elgharib, Ph.D.

Personal Details:

Office Address Qatar Computing Research Institute Tornado Tower, Doha, Qatar Email: [email protected] Website: http://blogs.bu.edu/gharib/

Work Experience:

Postdoctoral Researcher, Qatar Computing Research Institute, October 2013– present • Supervisor: Prof. Mohamed Hefeeda

Postdoctoral Research in Electrical and Computer Department, Boston University, January 2012 – October 2013

• Supervisor: Prof. Venkatesh Saligrama • By the end of my Post-doc I was a main member in securing a funding of $ 1.5 million. The funding was awarded for 18 months by DHS. • I worked in four main projects: 1. Detecting people moving in counter-flow direction in airport terminals. I have developed an algorithm that performs this task by analyzing digital video signals. The program was fully coded in C++ and it processes three cameras in real- time, each camera generating 30 frames per second of NTSC format. The program has been tested in Cleveland Hopkins International airport on 3 weeks (504 hours) of live data streaming. The algorithm generates 100% detection with 2 false alarms per week. This project is sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security and includes partners as SIEMENS, NEU and RPI. 2. Tag and track in airport terminals. The task is to manually tag suspects and track them through the airport terminal. Experiments are carried on data from Boston- Logan airport, Cleveland-Hopkins airport, and London CCTV footage. This project is sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security and includes partners as SIEMENS, NEU and RPI. 3. Single object query-based video search in airborne footage. We address the problem of retrieving video segments which contain objects moving in routes defined by the user. This project is sponsored by the Department of Defense. Here we generate a solution using Dynamic Programming. 4. Multiple objects content-based video search. We address the problem of retrieving video segments containing convey of objects moving according to a user-input query. Here we explore various graph-matching techniques. This project is sponsored by the Department of Defense.

Education:

PhD in Electronics and , Trinity College , Ireland, 2008 - 2011

 PhD Thesis Title: Handling Transparency in Digital Video  Supervisor: Prof. Anil Kokaram, Technology Lead at Mountain View, California.  I was able to finish my PhD in 3 years due to extensive hard work.

Brief Synopsis of Ph.D. thesis:

Digital video and manipulation has been the cornerstone of digital video broadcast and digital cinema industry for some time now. One of the major new advances in recent years has been a better understanding of images in sequences. This has allowed video processing tools to be increasingly used for postproduction and consumer video applications e.g. restoration, object cut out and frame rate conversion. However transparency in video still remains a challenge for all video processing tools and prevents automated tools from being used ubiquitously for video editing and inference. For example, in the vast literature on frame rate conversion motion compensated interpolation is a key component. When faced with transparency however, new frames cannot be built reliably using the usual assumption of only one moving object being observed. Archive restoration provides another good example. In that industry, automated dust busting has become important for removing dirt and sparkle from degraded image sequences. In this problem, the corruption is in fact transparent. However traditional techniques tended to ignore this and that meant that errors in detecting the degradations were very visible since hard rather than soft decisions were being taken at each pel site. My PhD handles three main problems related to transparency: 1) Archived Footage Restoration, 2) Transparency Detection in Image Sequences and 3) Multiple Motion Estimation for Regions of Transparency. At the end of my thesis I propose several improvements to current medical imaging techniques.

• My research results are summarized in http://www.mee.tcd.ie/~sigmedia/Misc/Transparency

BS in Electronics and Electrical Engineering, , 2008

• I have achieved my BS degree with First Class Honors (the highest grade in the British/Irish education system).

Publications:

 Mohamed A. Ahmed, Francois Pitie and Anil Kokaram. Extraction of Non-binary Blotch Mattes. In proceedings of the International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP ’09), November 2009, pages 2757-2760, Cairo, Egypt.  Mohamed A. Ahmed, Francois Pitie and Anil Kokaram. Reflection Detection in Image Sequences. In proceedings of IEEE Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR ’11), June 2011, Colorado, USA.  Mohamed A. Ahmed, Francois Pitie and Anil Kokaram. Multiple Motion Estimation for Regions of Reflections through Layer Separation. In proceedings of IEEE European Conference on Visual Media Production (CVMP ’11), 2011, UK (Oral).

 Mohamed A. Elgharib, Francois Pitie and Anil Kokaram. Blotch and Scratch Removal in Archived Film using a Semi-transparent Corruption Model and a Ground-truth Generation Technique. In Springer EURASIP Journal on Image and Video Processing, 2013:33.  Mohamed A. Elgharib, Francois Pitie, Anil Kokaram and Venkatesh Saligrama. User- Assisted Reflection Detection and Feature Point Tracking. In Proceedings of ACM European Conference on Visual Media Production (CVMP ’13), November 2013, UK.

Awards and Achievements:

• Full paid PhD scholarship from the Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering and Technology (IRCSET). • Funding from Adobe Systems and Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) for PhD related expenses. • Gold medalist of Trinity College Dublin (2008). • Funding from Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) for undergraduate research (summer 2007) • Winner of Trinity College Dublin Business competition for the Engineering Class of 2008. This competition was organized by the founder of Ireland’s most visited real-estate website www.daft.ie.

Invited Talks:

 “Real-time Implementation of a Counter-Flow Detection System for Airport Terminals”, The Annual Student Pipeline Industry Roundtable Event (Aspire), Northeastern University, Boston, MA 2013.  “Motion Estimation for Region of Reflections”, Faculty of Engineering, Cairo University, Egypt, 2011.  “Reflection Detection in Image Sequences”, Faculty of Engineering, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, 2011.  “Bayesian Inference for Blotch and Line Removal”, Faculty of Engineering, Trinity College, Ireland, 2011.

Skills: Programming Skills:

• C++ : multiple projects developed with 1000s of lines • MATLAB : multiple projects developed with 1000s of lines • Java : coding the Enigma encryption machine • Verilog : studied a course and developed an image processing program. • JaveScript, php, HTML, MySQL : self studied for developing a real-estate website.

Teaching Skills:

 Teaching assistant for the following undergraduate courses: o 3E1: Mathematics for Engineers o 3C1: Digital o 3C2: Digital Circuits o 3S1: Electrical Engineering Lab  In some courses I was responsible for as many as 50 students.

Languages:

• Arabic Mother tongue, English fluent.

Referees:

Prof. Anil Kokaram, Electronics and Electrical Engineering Department, Trinity College Dublin Current position: Technology Lead at Google Mountain View, California e-mail: [email protected]

Prof. Venkatesh Saligrama, Professor Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Boston University e-mail: [email protected]

Dr. Francois Pitie, Research Fellow Electronics and Electrical Engineering Department, Trinity College Dublin e-mail: [email protected]

Dr. Martin Burke, Senior Lecturer and Head of Department Electronics and Electrical Engineering Department, Trinity College Dublin e-mail: [email protected]