Research Areas and Publications

•  RESEARCH  

   

  My research activity has been mainly in the following three areas: ISM Applications of Microwave Energy and Image Compression and Applications of Information Theory  to source coding. The details are given below.

   

• ISM Applications of Microwave Energy

   

  Besides communications, microwave energy has many other industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) applications. I learnt about this area during my Ph.D work. The experimental work done includes conducting dielectric measurements using Cavity Perturbation Method and Time Domain Methods( both Reflection and Transmission) and use of Vector Network Analyser. Proper awareness about this area did not exist in India. I have written  four review articles in this area.  Three of  these  have been published in the Technical Review of the  Institution of Electronics and Telecommunications Engineeers (IETE), India.  One of these (Paper No. 3 under National Journals in the List of Publications. A copy attached with the application) was selected as the best paper in the category of industrial applications and was given CDIL Award by the IETE  in 1994.   Lately I have started looking into the area of Computational Electromagnetics and presented a paper in an International Conference conducted by th Space Applications Centre, Indian space Research Organisation (ISRO), in February 2005. I plan to use FDTD technique for solving some  problems such as that of a microwave absorber and finding field distribution in a microwave oven cavity(multimode cavity).

   

• Image compression

   

  It is widely accepted that very soon our society would be commonly using the facilities such as videophone, video-conferencing, e-commerce, interactive broadcasting including digital audio and HDTV. Image compression is considered as the key enabling technology for ushering in and sustaining the information revolution. Work  has been done in this area and improved versions of some second generation of image coding techniques for monochrome images were developed.    The work done in this area has been presented in various national and international conferences held in India.  One of the papers was given K S Krishnan  Memorial Award of the IETE in 1997  for being the best systems oriented paper  published in the IETE Journal of Research in 1997 (Paper No. 3 under National Journals in the List of Publications. A copy attached with the application).

   

   In addition to the above, optimization technique has been applied to the problem of a layered microwave absorber. Two conference papers and one journal paper has been written in this area.  ( Papers No 17 and 18 in conference papers, and Paper No 8  under National Journals in the List of Publications). In the area of source coding at present, we are looking into wavelet based compression.

   

• Information Theory

   

  A few years ago I taught a M E course on Coding Theory and Practice. This brought me closer to Information theory.  Thus in GIST, South Korea,  I offered a graduate course in this area (Information and Coding Theory; DIC 1609). In this course, I covered more than 75% topics given in the text book (Elements of Information Theory, T M Cover and J A Thomas, John Wiley, 1991). After   returning to India I have written the following three tutorial papers in the IETE Journal of Education: (i)  Information theory and its two basic applications, (ii)  Applications of  information theory to spectral estimation, and (iii) Joint source and channel coding.  I plan to write a few more on topics such as “ Rate Distortion Theory” and “Data Compression”. I shall be teaching a graduate course on “Data Compression” in the next Semester in my Institute.