On October 12th, Professor Pramod K. Varshney from Syracuse University will be visiting the Signal Processing Group.

He will present the following talk:

“Noise-Enhanced Information Systems, Denoising Noisy Signals with Noise”

Date: October 12th, 2015, 10:00 a.m.

Location: Merckstrasse 25, S3|06, room 202

Abstract:

Noise, traditionally defined as an unwanted signal, has been shown to play an important constructive role in many information processing systems. Performance enhancement via noise has been observed and employed in many physical, biological, and engineered systems. The concept of stochastic facilitation (SF) has been found critical for certain biological information functions such as detection of weak, subthreshold stimuli or suprathreshold signals through both experimental verification and analytical model simulations. In this talk, we present a systematic noise-enhanced information processing framework to analyze and optimize the performance of engineered systems. System performance is evaluated not only in terms of signal-to-noise ratio but also in terms of other more relevant metrics such as probability of error for signal detection or mean square error for parameter estimation. As an important new instance of SF, we also discuss the constructive effect of noise in associative memory recall. Potential enhancement of image processing systems through the addition of noise is discussed with important applications in biomedical image enhancement, image denoising, and classification. Some avenues for further research are outlined.