An NUI Galway researcher have been awarded a Gold Medal at the Young European Arena of Research for his work developing systems for pedestrian identification.

Winterlich’s research involves the development of mathematical techniques which can be used to measure the quality of images produced by safety-related cameras found in modern cars.

“Once we can describe image and video quality by means of a ‘number’ we can then develop and evaluate techniques which will improve image quality by compensating for distortions that occur due to slight imperfections in the cameras or due to compression of the video images,” says Winterlich.

This is a topic of increasing importance in the automotive industry due to the growing use of car-mounted camera systems for driver assistance and other applications such as automatic pedestrian detection.