EE Student Receives Dissertation Award

July 21, 2016

Electrical engineering student Chen Chen, who received his PhD from the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science this year, was granted the David Daniel Best Doctoral Dissertation Award.

Chen Chen began his doctoral studies in Fall 2012 in the Signal and Image Processing Laboratory under the supervision of Dr. Nasser Kehtarnavaz. Chen’s dissertation was titled “Fusion of Depth and Inertial Sensing for Human Action Recognition.” His research focused on achieving real-time and robust human action recognition under real-world operating conditions by fusing data from differing modality sensors consisting of a depth camera and an inertial sensor. His research has led to the development of a number of computationally efficient approaches for feature extraction, classification and decision fusion.

“Chen has integrated these developments into an actual working action recognition system which runs in real-time on any laptop platform and was demonstrated in the ‘Show and Tell’ sessions of two major IEEE conferences in signal processing,” said Dr. Kehtarnavaz. “As evident from his five journal and seven conference publications, two filed patents, Chen’s dissertation work has generated innovative contributions in the field of human action recognition and sensor fusion.”

One of Chen’s publications, “Improving Human Action Recognition Using Fusion of Depth Camera and Inertial Sensors,” was recognized as a most downloaded article of IEEE Trans. on Human-Machine Systems for a number of months. Another article, “Fusion of Inertial and Depth Sensor Data for Robust Hand Gesture Recognition,” was recognized as a most downloaded article of IEEE Sensors Journal in October 2014.

Chen Chen has joined the Center for Research in Computer Vision at the University of Central Florida as a postdoc. He is planning to apply for a faculty position after gaining further research experience in his postdoc position.