The Norwegian Color Research Laboratory

Wednesday January 25th 2012 a Norwegian expert group held its first meeting at Standard Norway, which is the Norwegian member of ISO. Standard Norway is responsible for most standardisation areas. The Norwegian Color Research Laboratory together with representatives from the Norwegian Graphic Art Industry and Standard Norway will contribute internationally to the Committee ISO/TC 130 Graphic technology. The scope of ISO/TC 130 is the standardisation of terminology, test methods and specifications in the field of printing and graphic technology from the original provided to finished products. A Norwegian ISO/TC 130 membership means that ISO standards are not only implemented, but Norway has a national mirror committee participating in the development and establishment of new standards and revising of existing standards. The membership is a unique opportunity to bring the Norwegian printing industry into a future-oriented production!

The Colorlab, Gjøvik University College hosted the CIMET consortium meeting 2012 held on 12-14th January. Co-ordinators, administrators and other representatives from all the four partner universities:  University Jean Monnet (France), University of Eastern Finland, University of Granada (Spain) and Gjøvik University College (Norway)  attended the meeting. 

Ivar Farup from the Colorlab contributes to CIE's technical committee on "The Calculation of Colour Matching Functions as a Function of Age and Field Size" (TC1-82). The TC should recommend a procedure for calculating XYZ-like colour matching functions from cone fundamentals, as a function of age and field size. The work will be based on the new  2- og 10-degree standard that are under development by TC1-36. In addition a software to calculate the color matching functions will be developed. The TC is lead by Jan Henrik Wold, a former member of the Colorlab, and the committee consists of I. Farup, C. F. Andersen, M. Brill, M. Fairchild, H. Fairman,C. Lee, K. Richter, F. Viénot, M. Withouck, and Y. Yamauchi.

The Colorlab invites applications for two 3-year full-time Early Stage Researcher (ESR) positions in the context of the EU-funded Marie Curie Initial Training Network project entitled Colour Printing 7.0: Next Generation Multi-Channel Printing (CP7.0). There is one position with the title Spectral modelling for multi-channel printers and displays and one with the title Design and development of spectral colour management workflows. For more information visit www.cp70.org or apply directly at http://hig.easycruit.com/vacancy/653439/42360?iso=no

The Colorlab and Océ continue their good co-operation. Océ has given the Colorlab access to a high-tech large-scale plotter. Wednesday 7th of December three representatives from Océ visited the Colorlab to officially hand over the plotter. Henning Hagelund and Anton Strand from Océ Norway and Dirk Brouns, vice president for strategy planning at Océ’s headquarter in Venlo, the Netherlands were at Gjøvik University College this day.

On the 7. and 8. of December the Norwegian Research School of Technology arranged a PhD workshop at campus Grimstad at the University of Agder. Jon Y. Hardeberg, Raju Shrestha, and Steven Le Moan from the Colorlab attended the workshop, where the PhD students presented their work. Steven Le Moan says: "It allowed some of us to realize that, even though we don't belong to the same scientific communities, even though we don't always use the same words to describe our work, we share the same ideas and face the same challenges". 

Jon Y. Hardeberg is a co-author on an article recently published in the journal of the Society for Information Display (SID). The article is written in collaboration with previous Colorlab member Jean-Baptiste Thomas (Université de Bourgogne) and Philippe Colantoni (Université Jean Monnet). The article presents a new model based on adaptive training data for high-end colorimetric display characterization. 

Read more on the SID webpage or download a pre-print here.

Steven Le Moan and Jon Yngve Hardeberg represented the Colorlab at the Color and Imaging Conference in San Jose in November. Jon Yngve Hardeberg gave a short course titled "Introduction to Multispectral Color Imaging", which introduced the concept of multispectral color imaging, and showed how increasing the number of color channels beyond three can resolve limitations of conventional image capture and reproduction system. Steven Le Moan gave an oral presentation of his paper "Saliency-based Band Selection for Spectral Image Visualization", which can be downloaded here. 

Clotilde Boust wants to learn more about the technical part of color science, and chose to be a guest researcher at the Colorlab at GUC for two months. Clotilde Boust works as a researcher at the Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Musées de France C2RMF in Paris and among other things she is leading projects about color imaging for the preservation of art at the museum.

Following a call for proposals from the Higher Education Ministry in Norway and the Foreign and European affairs Ministry in France, a new Master course is opening in September 2012.

This Franco-Norwegian Master course will focus on "3D Multimedia Technology" between the Faculty of Science and Technology of University Jean Monnet of Saint-Etienne and Gjøvik University College. The Master is based on the Master "Optics, Image, Vision" delivered by University Jean Monnet in Saint-Etienne and the Master in "Media Technology" of Gjøvik University College. 

Ferdinand Deger has just started his PhD at the Colorlab in collaboration with the Laboratoire d’Electronique, Informatique et Image (Le2i) at the Université de Bourgogne, France. His work will focus on 3D multispectral imaging for cultural heritage, and he will be supervised by Professor Yvon Voisin (Université de Bourgogne), Professor Jon Yngve Hardeberg (Gjøvik University College) and Associate Professor Alamin MansouriI (Université de Bourgogne).

The Colorlab welcomes Ferdinand as a PhD student.  

The Colorlab is leading a training and research project funded by Marie Curie Initial Training Networks (ITN). The project is in collaboration with 5 full network partners and 8 associated partners from academia and industry throughout Europe. The goal will be to train a new generation of printing scientists who will be able to assume science and technology leadership in this established technological sector. In total 7 PhD students and 2 post doctoral researchers are to be recruited. 

For more information on the project and the research positions visit www.colorlab.no/cp70 or www.cp70.org. 

Xingbo Wang has just started his PhD in the Colorlab. In the next three years he will focus on filter arrays for multispectral acquisition. Xingbo has a background in research, media, and engeneering, and in addition he completed his masters in the Color in Informatics and Media Technology (CIMET) programme, in which the Colorlab is one of the partners. 

We welcome Xingbo to the Colorlab, and we are looking forward to benefiting from his knowledge and effort.

Recently HP sponsored the Colorlab with a brand new HP Designjet Z3200 44" large format photo printer. This is a 12 ink system printer with the following inks: blue, green, magenta, red, yellow, gray, photo black, matte black, light cyan, light gray, light magenta, gloss enhancer. The printer will be used in both teaching and research, and it will be extensively used in our upcoming EU project. 

Andrzej Kordecki from Silesian University of Technology in Poland recently visited the Colorlab. His PhD project on colorimetric calibration of digital imaging devices required him to come to the Colorlab in order to use specialized measurement devices. During his two week stay he managed to do key parts for his PhD, such as measurements of the spectral power distribution of light and linearization of the camera's sensor. 

There are two new PhD positions opening at the Colorlab. The first project is on "Audio- and Video-Guided Interactive Performance of Computer Music ". This project will investigate into how auditory, visual, and other clues and cues can be used to guide the performance of computer music, turning the computer into more of an interplayer. This will enable the improvisation tempo, dynamics and phrasing found in human performances.

The second project is on "Quality Evaluation and Enhancement of Reproduced Images ". This project will focus on the development of image quality metrics correlated with perceived image quality as well as the innovative usage of such metrics to improve or optimise the quality of colour image reproduction algorithms, devices, or systems.

For more information check vacancies.

Colorlab congratulates Marius Pedersen for successfully defending his PhD thesis today at the University of Oslo, Institute of Informatics. He is employed at the Norwegian Colour Research Laboratory at the Faculty of Computer Science and Media Technology at Gjøvik University College (GUC).

Marius Pedersen from the Colorlab will defend his thesis “Image quality metrics for the evaluation of printing workflows” on the 28th of October at the University of Oslo. The trial lecture and defense takes place in Kristen Nygaards sal (5370) in Ole-Johan Dahls hus (Gaustadalléen 23B., Oslo) at 1015 and 1315, respectively. The trial lecture subject is "Face detection: state of the art and potential applications".

Marius Pedersen has been under the supervision of Pr. Jon Yngve Hardeberg (Gjøvik University College), Pr. Fritz Albregtsen (University of Oslo), and Dr. Nicolas Bonnier (Océ).

Additional information can also be found at the website for the University of Oslo.

In the October edition of AGI, a Norwegian graphic arts magazine, a two page article on our upcoming EU project on multi-channel printing, our ten year anniversary, and the PhD defense of Marius Pedersen. 

The Norwegian Color Research Laboratory,  Gjøvik University College (GUC) is organizing a 4th Colorlab workshop of this year on Thursday October 27th, 2011. The workshop takes place at Gjøvik University College (GUC) in room G302.

Two guest speakers: Prof. Jan P. Allebach from Purdue University, USA, and Prof. Heikki Kälviäinen from Lappeenranta University of Technology (LUT), Finland will give talks during the workshop.

The workshop is free and open to all. For more details, check here.

PhD student Raju Shrestha has recently published an article in the special issue "Multispectral and Hyperspectral Image and Video Processing" in EURASIP's Journal on Advances in Signal Processing. The article is co-authored with Alamin Mansouri and Jon Yngve Hardeberg. The paper proposes a one-shot six-channel multispectral color image acquisition system using a stereo camera.

Access the full article on http://asp.eurasipjournals.com/content/2011/1/57

Dibakar Pant and Ivar Farup have just published an article in the well-known journal Color Research and Application. The work titled "Riemannian formulation and comparison of color difference formulas" studies color differences using the Riemannian approach. By this approach, it is  possible to evaluate the performance of various color difference fourmlas having different color spaces for measuring visual color difference. 

For more information visit http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/col.20710/abstract 

Earlier this year Steven Le Moan presented a paper at the Scandinavian Conference on Image Analysis. Steven summaries the work as following: "Very few works have dared to extend the study of saliency outside the scope of visual attention modeling. Nevertheless, powerful measures of informative content can be derived from it. This paper presents a model to compute saliency maps for spectral images, and introduces one application on the evaluation of dimensionality reduction methods." Read more about this work in the article or look at the poster.

During the Gjøvik Color Imaging Symposium (GCIS) the ten year anniversary of the Colorlab was celebrated. After a session with talks on the history of the Colorlab, the importance of the Colorlab  locally, nationally, and internationally the anniversery was celebrated with a Colorlab cake. 

The GCIS is ongoing with many interresting talks. You will find the complete program here.

The Norwegian Color Research Laboratory (Colorlab) at Gjøvik University College has been chosen to coordinate an EU project with a budget of 17 million NOK! Only two other university colleges in Norway have coordination responsibilities in this category of EU projects.

Gjøvik Color Imaging Symposium 2011 (GCIS2011) takes place in Gjøvik on 7th to 9th September 2011. During GCIS2011, the ten year anniversary of the Colorlab will be celebrated.