ECE Alumnus Vishal Patel Wins 2021 Early CAREER Award

Alumnus Vishal Patel (EE Ph.D. 2010) has been awarded a 2021 Early CAREER Award through the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development Program. This prestigious award recognizes early-career faculty with the potential to serve as an academic role model in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.

The $500,000, five-year award is for his project titled, “Seeing Through Atmospheric Turbulence: Image Restoration and Understanding using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks,” and will allow Patel and his team to develop data-driven learning-based approaches for restoration and understanding of images degraded by atmospheric turbulence. With this research, algorithms will be developed to enhance the quality of images and video collected by long-range visible and infrared imaging systems, which will allow future applications to include remote remote sensing, including long-range surveillance, optical communications, astronomy, road traffic monitoring, underwater imaging and autonomous navigation.

Patel is currently an associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University Whiting School of Engineering. His research interests include biomedical image analysis, biometrics, computer vision, machine learning, and signal and image processing. Prior to joining the faculty at Johns Hopkins, he was the ECE A. Walter Tyson Assistant Professor at Rutgers University.

After earning dual degrees in Electrical Engineering and Applied Mathematics, plus a MS degree in Applied Mathematics from North Carolina State University, Patel attended the University of Maryland to pursue his Ph.D. In 2010, he was awarded a Doctorate in Electrical Engineering under the supervision of College Park Professor Rama Chellappa. From 2010 to 2015, Patel was a member of the research faculty in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS).

Patel has received a number of awards, including the 2016 ONR Young Investigator Award and the 2016 Jimmy Lin Invention Award. He also received recognition after receiving Best Paper Awards at IEEE AVSS (Advanced Video and Signal-Based Surveillance) in 2017 and 2019, a Best Paper Award at IEEE BTAs in 2015, and an Honorable Mention Paper Award from the International Association for Pattern Recognition International Conference in Biometrics in 2018. In addition, he is the Associate Editor for the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine and Pattern Recognition Journal, serves on the Machine Learning for Signal Processing Committee of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, and is Vice President of Conferences for the IEEE Biometric Council.

Published July 22, 2021