The UNBC Computer Science Department and IEEE Northern BC invite Staff, Students, Faculty and the Public to the following presentation:

Title:                    Compressing Color Maps, and Graphs via Color Separation
Speaker:             Dr. Saif Zahir, Computer Science, UNBC
Date:                    Friday, March 12
Time:                   10:00 to 11:00 A.M.
Location:            7-152 (Lecture Theatre)

Abstract:

Color maps and graphs are widely used in a variety of applications such as geographic information systems, intelligent transportation systems, mobile computing, and the Internet. The relatively large size of color maps and graphs has negatively impacted their usage in many of such application especially in small storage mobile wireless devices and limited bandwidth data transmission systems. To meet storage and transmission requirements, the use of efficient compression methods becomes imperative. In this research, a fast lossless compression scheme for digital map images and graph images in the raster image format is introduced.  This scheme consists of two main contributions. The first is the creation of a codebook that is based on symbol entropy and the second is our row-column reduction coder. The scheme parcels each color in a layer against a background and compresses each layer separately. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme achieved on average a compression of 0.035 bpp for map images and 0.03 bpp for charts and graphs. These results are better than reported results in the literature. Moreover, the proposed scheme is fast and can be used as real time coder.

Bio:

Dr.Saif alZahir received his PhD degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Pittsburgh.  He is presently an associate professor with the computer science program at the University of Northern British Columbia, Canada. Dr. alZahir is involved in research in the areas of image compression, image retrieval and indexing, wireless communications, graphics, mobile computing, m-learning and corporate governance. He has authored or co-authored more than 50 journal papers, conference papers, and book chapters.

Dr. alZahir is the editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Corporate Governance; the editor-in-chief of the International Journal on Signal Processing; and editor in Recent Patents Signal Processing - Journal. He has served on many Technical Program Committees and chaired numerous technical sessions in International Conferences.

Light refreshments served