March 2017 edition – Vol.9 no.3

EDITORIAL

Our management team is preparing to publish the 2016 annual report, the annual symposium in May, and the annual general meeting of members to adjust the focus in our practices and work. In addition, we have four renowned speakers from a variety of international research centers, three of which are distinguished lecturers elected by either IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society or IEEE Circuits and Systems Society (seminars, ReSMiQ symposium). We serve our members and promote conditions for student researchers to foster their abilities to innovate.

On 22nd March, the Symposium of the Electronic Industry Group (RIE) entitled “Electronics for the People” was held at Polytechnique Montréal. The RIE aims to bring together manufacturers, service companies and partners who demonstrate their intention to promote and contribute to the objectives of the corporation and to stimulate the Québec industry. ReSMiQ was a partner of this event and several of its members participated as speakers and panelists. Gabriela Nicolescu of Polytechnique Montréal presented the conference “Modeling and analysis of 3D multiprocessors on chip for the future cloud computing” and Mohamad Sawan of Polytechnique Montréal presented the closing conference “Intelligent medical devices: industrial opportunities and rewarding research” . Daniel Massicote of the UQTR was invited to participate in the roundtable “Carrier niches for the electronics industry: How to access it? “. The symposium participants were invited to visit the PolyFab laboratory. More details

RIE22marsDe gauche à droite: Luc Péloquin – CNRC, Jean-Louis Moreau – CAE, Daniel Massicotte – UQTR, Thierry Pagé – Univalor.

ReSMiQ is a group of researchers in an interuniversity research center that can count on the support of the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Nature et technologies (FRQNT) and nine (9) Quebec universities involved in microsystems research.

NEWS FROM OUR MEMBERS

Exposure

– Dr. Martel from Polytechnique Montréal and his team from the Nanorobotics Laboratory received the Québec Science Discovery of the year 2016 Award, for their major breakthrough in cancer research.
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– Dr. Gosselin from Université Laval will address a keynote presentation at the IEEE Research boost conference to be held at the École de technologie supérieure in Montréal,  on April 6, 2017.
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Achievement
– Dr. Shi from Université Laval received a strategic partnership grant from NSERC for « Integrated mid-IR photonics enabling ubiquitous sensing ».

RESMIQ’S ACTIVITIES

Intensive course
Yen-Kuang Chen from Intel Corp. in the  U.S.A. presented the seminar entitled «Challenges and Opportunities of circuits and systems on Internet of Things» as well as Manuel Delgado-Restituto from the Instituto de Microelectronica de Sevilla in Spain presented the seminar entitled «Neural Spike Recording for Brain-Machine Interfaces» at Polytechnique Montréal, organized as part of our continuing training program in collaboration with the IEEE Montréal’s chapters of the Solid State Circuit Society (SSCS) and the Circuits and Systems Society (CASS).

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Chen

restituto
See the abstracts: Yen-Kuang Chen / Manuel Delgad-Restituto

Scientific poster competition – Call for proposals
SUBMISSION DEADLINE: April 3 2017
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SIGNAL is the main monthly information medium of the Microsystems Strategic Alliance of Québec (ReSMiQ). This newsletter aims to be an active link between the members of ReSMiQ and all individuals who have an interest in research and innovation in microsystems. We commit ourselves to promote in it our members’ research and increase ReSMiQ’s visibility.

ReSMiQ is a group of researchers in an interuniversity research center that can count on the support of the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Nature et technologies (FRQNT) and nine (9) Quebec universities involved in microsystems research.

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UPCOMING CONFERENCES

2023 International Conference on Microelectronics (ICM)
from December 17 to 20, 2023, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.
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2023 IEEE 11th International Conference on Systems and Control (ICSC)
from December 18 to 20, 2023, Sousse, Tunisia.
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2024 37th International Conference on VLSI Design and 2024 23rd International Conference on Embedded Systems (VLSID)
from January 6 to 10, 2024, Kolkata, India.
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2024 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC)
from February 18 to 22, 2024, San Francisco, California, USA.
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2024 IEEE 15th Latin America Symposium on Circuits and Systems (LASCAS)
from February 27 to March 1, 2024, Punta del Este, Uruguay.
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2024 IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC)
from April 21 to 24, 2024, Denver, Colorado, USA.
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2024 IEEE 6th International Conference on AI Circuits and Systems (AICAS)
from April 22 to 25, 2024, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.
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2024 9th International Conference on Integrated Circuits, Design, and Verification (ICDV)
from June 6 to 7, 2024, Hanoi, Vietnam.
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2024 61st ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC)
from June 23 to 27, 2024, San Francisco, California, USA.
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2024 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME)
from July 15 to 19, 2024, Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada.
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MEMBER PROFILE

Prof. Pierre Langlois
Polytechnique Montréal
Member of ReSMiQ since 2006

Pierre Langlois

Pierre Langlois received the Ph.D. degree in Computer Engineering from the Royal Military College of Canada (RMC), Ontario, Canada, in 2002. He served for several years as an Engineering Officer with the Royal Canadian Navy. He was an Assistant Professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at RMC. Currently, Prof. Langlois is the Director and a Professor in the Department of Computer and Software Engineering, Polytechnique de Montréal, QC, Canada. His current research interests are in the design methods and the implementation of hardware architectures and embedded processors for applications in biomedical systems, high definition video, and routers for 5G networks. He has authored or co-authored more than 90 journals and refereed conference papers and holds one patent. Prof. Langlois has served as a member of technical committees of several international conferences such as DASIP 2014-2017, IEEE NEWCAS, 2007-2013, IEEE ASAP 2008-2012, and IEEE ISSPA 2012. He has been a member of different decision-making and evaluation committees at Polytechnique Montreal, FRQNT, and NSERC. Prof. Langlois received the Excellence in Teaching Award from Polytechnique Montreal in 2015 and the Prix Méritas as a teacher in 2015, 2012, 2011 and 2007. More details

Below is a selection of publications in recent years followed by representative work.

  1. L. Seoud, T. Hurtut, J. Chelbi, F. Cheriet and J.M.P. Langlois, "Red Lesion Detection Using Dynamic Shape Features for Diabetic Retinopathy Screening," in IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, vol. 35, no. 4, pp. 1116-1126, April 2016. doi: 10.1109/TMI.2015.2509785
  2. S. Vakili, J.M.P. Langlois, G. Bois (2016). Accuracy-aware processor customisation for fixed-point arithmetic. IET Computers and Digital Techniques, 10(1), 11 pages. DOI : 10.1049/iet-cdt.2014.0188
  3. G.-A. Bilodeau, S. Desgent, R. Farah, S. Duss, J.M.P. Langlois, L. Carmant (2015). Body temperature measurement of an animal by tracking in biomedical experiments. Signal Image and Video Processing, 9(2), p. 251-259. DOI : 10.1007/s11760-013-0502-x
  4. R. Farah, J.M.P. Langlois, G.-A. Bilodeau (2015). Computing a rodent’s diary. Signal, Image and Video Processing, 10(3), p. 567-574. DOI : 10.1007/s11760-015-0776-2
  5. Q.F. Gan, J.M.P. Langlois, Y. Savaria (2014). Efficient Uniform Quantization Likelihood Evaluation for Particle Filters in Embedded Implementations. Journal of Signal Processing Systems for Signal Image and Video Technology, 75(3), p. 191-202. DOI : 10.1007/s11265-013-0798-3
  6. Q. Gan, J.M.P. Langlois, Y. Savaria (2014). A Parallel Systematic Resampling Algorithm for High-Speed Particle Filters in Embedded Systems. Circuits, Systems & Signal Processing, 33(11), p. 3591-3602. DOI : 10.1007/s00034-014-9820-7
  7. M. Fasih, J.M.P. Langlois, F. Cheriet (2014). Retinal image quality assessment using generic features. SPIE Medical Imaging 2014. DOI : 10.1117/12.2043325
  8. R. Farah, Q. Gan, J.M.P. Langlois, G.-A. Bilodeau, Y. Savaria (2014). A computationally efficient importance sampling tracking algorithm. Machine Vision and Applications, 25(7), p. 1761-1777. DOI : 10.1007/s00138-014-0630-5

RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS

Red Lesion Detection Using Dynamic Shape Features
for Diabetic Retinopathy Screening

The development of an automatic telemedicine system for computer-aided screening and grading of diabetic retinopathy depends on reliable detection of retinal lesions in fundus images. In this paper, a novel method for automatic detection of both microaneurysms and hemorrhages in color fundus images is described and validated. The main contribution is a new set of shape features, called Dynamic Shape Features that do not require precise segmentation of the regions to be classified. These features represent the evolution of the shape during image flooding and allow discriminating between lesions and vessel segments. The method is validated per-lesion and per-image using six databases, four of which are publicly available. It proves to be robust with respect to variability in image resolution, quality, and acquisition system. On the Retinopathy Online Challenge's database, the method achieves a FROC score of 0.420 which ranks it fourth. On the Messidor database, when detecting images with diabetic retinopathy, the proposed method achieves an area under the ROC curve of 0.899, comparable to the score of human experts, and it outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.

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Fig. 1. Image preprocessing steps. (a) Original image I; (b) illumination equalization; (c) adaptive contrast equalization; (d) color normalization. The lower row shows a detailed area of the image after each processing step; (b) Illumination Equalization; (c) Adaptive Contrast Equalization; (d) Color Normalization.

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Fig. 2.
Examples of lesion detection. The top row shows the Gp images (dark lesions). The bottom row shows the detected lesions. The probability threshold is set to 0.24, corresponding to 51% per-lesion sensitivity and an average of 3.3 FPI. True positives are filled in red or marked by a red square. False positives are circled in green. Sample false negatives are marked by blue triangles.