Office Hours
By appointment.
Bio
Dr. Elisa Barney Smith joined the faculty at Boise State University in September 1999. Her research focuses on image processing and machine learning. She has been a visiting professor at University of the Saarland (Germany), LORIA (France) and Telecom ParisTech(France). During the 2014-2015 academic year she is again on sabbatical.
From 1989 to 1993 she worked as an engineer at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in New London, CT. In 1993, she had a research internship at the NATO SACLANT Centre in LaSpezia, Italy. Her work at both NUWC and SACLANT Centre involved designing automatic target classification algorithms and systems that utilize passive acoustic data.
Elisa was an adjunct faculty in the Computer Science Department at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Plattsburgh for the Spring of 1999. She was an adjunct faculty at the Thames Valley State Technical College (now Three Rivers State Technical College) in Norwich, CT from 1992 to 1993. She also earned secondary (7-12) teaching certification in Math and Physics for the State of New York.
Dr. Barney Smith is a member of IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) and SPIE (Society of Photo-optical Instrumentation Engineers). She was chair of the Boise section of IEEE from 2000-2003, and chair of Region 6's North-East Area from 2009-2013.
Education
- B.S. in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY
- M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical, Computer and Systems Engineering in 1989 and 1998
Publications
Research
- Dr. Barney Smith's main research focus is in document imaging. Current projects are centered around developing models of the degradations produced by optical page scanners, printers, FAX machines and photocopiers. These models will be used to improve the recognition and processing of the images. These models will be calibrated with bilevel scans of high contrast images. Ability to do this with text images instead of specialized test charts will make this transparent to the user. She is currently PI on an NSF CAREER grant to support this research. Related work is a current project sponsored by NSF on reading paper election ballots.
- A second research focus is biomedical image and signal processing. Several projects have been undertaken in this area. Computer vision and image processing algorithms are combined to match 3-D joint images of human joints with 2-D fluoroscopy (video X-ray) image sequences. This produces a technique that can accurately quantify how bones in a joint move relative to one another during dynamic activities. Knowledge of the exact spatial position of the two joint bones will allow biomedical researchers to develop techniques to diagnose the extent of joint injuries.
- Improving image segmentation in ultrasound and other biomedical images, and developing user-friendly software to process EMG signals are other projects
-
Dr. Barney Smith also works on projects in conjunction with NASA. A project in cooperation with the High Energy Astrophysics group at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center aimed to design a telescope capable of slewing rapidly and then analyze the images received from the telescope to detect and understand optical afterglows of Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs). GRBs are perhaps the most exciting development in astronomy in the past decade. They are highly energetic originating at the far reaches of the known universe. Notification of these GRB events comes from satellites that can not slew quick enough to observe the initial time period of these events. These notifications are broadcast world wide to both professional and amateur astronomers. She has also supervised three BSU teams accepted into NASA's Microgravity University program.
Areas Of Interest
- Signal Processing, Image Processing, Pattern Recognition
