Namrata Vaswani
Assistant Professor 
Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering,  Iowa State University
3121 Coover Hall, Ames IA 50011  Email: namrata  AT iastate  DOT edu    Phone: 515-294-4012   Fax: 515-294-8432  

Biography

CV

Publications

Research Description & Recent Invited Talks

Teaching

Students

Funding

Biography:

• Assistant Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering, Iowa State University (Aug 2005 - present)
• Postdoctoral Fellow & Research Scientist, Electrical & Computer Engineering, Georgia Tech (Aug 2004 - Aug 2005)
• Research Intern,  Signal and Image Processing, HRL (formerly Hughes Research Labs), Malibu, CA (June 2001 - Oct 2001)
  
• Ph.D., Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park   (Aug 1999 - Aug 2004)
• B.Tech., Electrical Engineering,  Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi, India     (Aug 1995 - May 1999)

Curriculum Vitae (CV):   (pdf)   (not updated)

Research:   Detailed description
My research interests are in estimation and detection problems in sequential signal processing, biomedical image sequence analysis and computer vision. Current focus is on sequential state (signal) estimation, tracking, change detection and shape analysis. Ongoing and past  projects include
(a) sequential compressed sensing (Kalman filtered compressed sensing and its extensions)
(b) particle filters for tracking on large dimensional state spaces and applications in deformable object (or Region of Interest) contour tracking,
(c) change detection in state space models with unknown change parameters, 
(d) landmark shape sequence analysis and applications in group activity tracking and recognition, 
past projects:
(e) subspace methods for image/video/pattern classification,
(f) image compression. 

Detailed Description   Videos   

Recent Invited Talks:

• Tracking (Optimal Filtering) on Large Dimensional State Spaces, UCLA (May'07) & UCSD (Dec'06)
  
• Deformable Contour Tracking and System Identification, SAMSI workshop on Geometry and Statistics of Shape Spaces (July'07), IPAM workshop on Random Shapes for Image Processing (May'07), Univ of Iowa (March'07), IMA Shape Spaces workshop (March'06)
  

• Abnormal "Shape Activity" Detection & Tracking, UC-Berkeley, Computer Vision Seminar Series (Nov'05)

Graduate Students:
Wei Lu   (M.S. from USTC, China)
Samarjit Das (B.Tech from IIT-Guwahati, India)
Chenlu Qiu (B.S. from Southeast University, China)

Funding:

• ECCS division (Engineering) at NSF:  Change Detection in Nonlinear Systems and Applications in Shape Analysis, 8/15/07 - 7/31/10
• Iowa State Univ VPR Office, Faculty Grant Development Award, Summer 2006

Teaching:

• Office Hours (Fall 2008):  Tuesday, 4-5pm, Friday 2-3pm
  
• Fall 2008: EE 322 (Probabilistic Methods for Electrical Engineers)
  
• Spring 2008: EE 527 (Detection and Estimation Theory)
  
• Fall 2007: EE 322 (Probabilistic Methods for Electrical Engineers)
  
• Spring 2007: EE 528 (Digital Image Processing)
• Fall 2006: EE 322 (Probabilistic Methods for Electrical Engineers)
• Fall 2006: EE 597 (CSP Seminar)
• Spring 2006:  EE 224 (Signals and Systems) Lab, Sections B & F
• Fall 2005: EE 520: Special Topics in Signal Processing for Image Analysis and Computer Vision

Publications:                                 Publications Listed by Area 

•    Journal Publications (Chronological)
1. Namrata Vaswani, Particle Filtering for Large Dimensional State Spaces with Multimodal Observation Likelihoods, To Appear in IEEE Trans. Signal Processing, 2008
2. Namrata Vaswani, Yogesh Rathi, Anthony Yezzi, Allen Tannenbaum, PF-MT with an Interpolation Effective Basis for Tracking Local Contour Deformations, Accepted (with mandatory minor revisions) to IEEE Trans. Image Processing, 2008.
   
3. Yogesh Rathi, Namrata Vaswani, Allen Tannenbaum, Anthony Yezzi, Tracking Deforming Objects using Particle Filtering for Geometric Active Contours, IEEE Trans. on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI), pp. 1470-1475, August 2007.
4. Yogesh Rathi, Namrata Vaswani, Allen Tannenbaum, A Generic Framework for Tracking using Particle Filter with Dynamic Shape Prior, IEEE Trans. Image Processing, pp.1370-1382, May 2007
   
5. Namrata Vaswani, Additive Change Detection in Nonlinear Systems with Unknown Change Parameters,  IEEE Trans. Signal Processing, March 2007.
6. Namrata Vaswani, Rama Chellappa, Principal Component Null Space Analysis for Image and Video Classification,  IEEE Trans. Image Processing, July 2006.
7. Namrata Vaswani, Amit Roy-Chowdhury, Rama Chellappa, "Shape Activity": A Continuous State HMM for Moving/Deforming Shapes with Application to Abnormal Activity Detection, IEEE Trans. Image Processing, pp 1603-1616, October 2005
8. A. Ramamoorthy, N.Vaswani,  S. Chaudhury and S. Bannerjee, Recognition of Dynamic Hand Gestures , Pattern Recognition, Vol. 36, No. 9, pp. 2069-2081, September, 2003
9. Bookchapter: N. Vaswani, A.K. Agrawal, Q. Zheng, R. Chellappa, Moving Object Detection and Compression in IR Sequences,  bookchapter in Computer Vision beyond the Visible Spectrum, Eds B. Bhanu and I. Pavlidis, Springer, 2003.

•   Selected Conference Publications
1. Namrata Vaswani, Kalman Filtered Compressed Sensing, IEEE Intl. Conf. Image Proc. (ICIP), 2008.
2. Samarjit Das and Namrata Vaswani, Model-based Compression of Nonstationary Landmark Shape Sequences, IEEE Intl. Conf. Image Proc. (ICIP), 2008.
3. Amit Kale and Namrata Vaswani, Generalized ELL for Detecting and Tracking Through Illumination Model Changes, IEEE Intl. Conf. Image Proc. (ICIP), 2008.
4. Namrata Vaswani and Samarjit Das, Particle Filter with Efficient Importance Sampling and Mode Tracking (PF-EIS-MT) and its Application to Landmark Shape Tracking, invited paper at Asilomar 2007
5. Bi Song, Namrata Vaswani, Amit Roy-Chowdhury, Closed-loop Tracking and Change Detection in Multi-Activity Sequences,  IEEE Intl. Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2007
   
6. Amit Kale, Namrata Vaswani, Christopher Jaynes, Particle Filter with Mode Tracker (PF-MT)  for Visual Tracking across Illumination Change, to appear in IEEE Intl. Conf. on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing  (ICASSP), 2007
7. Namrata Vaswani,   Particle Filters for Infinite (Or Large) Dimensional State Spaces - Part 2 , IEEE Intl. Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing  (ICASSP), 2006.
8. Namrata Vaswani and Rama Chellappa,   NonStationary "Shape Activities",  IEEE Conf. on Decision and Control (CDC), 2005

9. Namrata Vaswani,   Bound on Errors in Particle Filtering with Incorrect Model Assumptions and  its Implication for Change Detection, IEEE Intl. Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing  (ICASSP), 2004.  Selected among top 15% papers in Signal Processing Theory and Methods category, and received an invitation to submit to IEEE Signal Processing Society journals.

10. More