Sea Grant Funds LaSSO Project

A Louisiana Sea Grant/Louisiana Space Grant (LSG/LaSPACE) collaboration will fund two undergraduate research projects beginning in September. The joint program, called Louisiana Space and Sea Grant Opportunity (LaSSO), is modeled after similar, long-established undergraduate research programs at both LSG and LaSPACE.

LSG will fund a project titled:

Emerging Computing for Underwater Image Processing at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette (ULL). The principal investigator is M. Hassan Najafi, assistant professor in the School of Computing and Informatics. Jonas Schmidt, a computer science and mathematics major, is the student researcher.

The project will explore the application of emerging computing techniques in underwater image processing. Within the scope of the project, the research team will develop and implement a lightweight hardware design for underwater image processing by employing hyperdimensional computing (HDC) and stochastic computing (SC). HDC is effective in extracting abstract information from data, while SC can perform complex operations using simple low-cost circuits. This study will address two fundamental computer vision problems – image filtering and image classification – and will propose novel hardware designs to address them.

Each project will receive $4,000 in funding. LaSSO is directed at science and engineering students who are working on projects in research areas deemed a priority by both the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The intent of LaSSO is to supplement and enhance the undergraduate academic curriculum by providing science/engineering students with a hands-on, mentored research experience relevant to space, earth, coastal and/or marine sciences.