Abhijit Sarkar

Greetings! Welcome to my website. I am a PhD student specializing in color science. I work for Thomson Corporate Research, Rennes, France, and am also affiliated to the IRCCyN-IVC Laboratory, (Institut de Recherche en Communications et en Cybernétique de Nantes), a part of Ecole Polytechnique and the University of Nantes, Nantes. University of Nantes is the second largest university in France in terms of student population.

This page contains my professional and academic information.  For everything else, please visit my Personal page.

What is color science? What can you possibly do with a degree in color science?

I encounter these questions all too often while describing to someone my work, so I would like to make an attempt to explain in simple terms why the world should need people calling themselves experts in color science.  Think about your camera, your printer, your  television set, or even your iPOD and mobile phones (including iPhone of course).  The high quality of color in these devices that you have come to take for granted is not actually very easy to achieve. The manufacturers of these devices need color scientists and engineers to develop methods and algorithms (probably in collaboration with hardware and software engineers) to achieve superior color experience. A lot has to do with the fundamentals of human vision and perception, that is, how our visual system works and perceives colors. Once you have a fair amount of knowledge on these basic sciences, the next challenge is to apply this knowledge in a specific application domain and come up with an engineering solution. It is not hard to imagine it needs specialized knowledge and professional experience. The imaging industry is just one example where color experts are needed. Other examples include the media and entertainment industry (can partly fall under imaging as well), paint manufaturing, cosmetics manufaturing, so on and so forth.

The field of color science is quite interdisciplinary, involving physics, chemistry, physiology, statistics, computer science and psychology. Many people in this industry, like myself, have an interdisciplinary background. You cannot be a good color expert just with an electrical engineering background, neither can you survive simply with a physiology or psychology degree.  This is also the reason why color science is a fascinating field. It is truly a confluence of science and engineering.

There are many interesting websites on color science. A fascinating website is http://www.cis.rit.edu/fairchild/WhyIsColor/. You can look at http://www.cis.rit.edu/mcsl/outreach/categories.php. A more technical website is http://www.brucelindbloom.com/.  Of course, these are only three out of...a lot, I think.

Education

I finished my undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering from Jadavpur university, in Kolkata (Calcutta), India in 2000. My specialization was Illumination  Engineering.  In January 2003, I moved to the US for my graduate studies.  I earned my first MS in Architectural Engineering (Lighting/Electrical) from Pennsylvania State University in 2005.  My second MS was in Color Science from the Munsell Color Science laboratory under Center for Imaging Science, Rochester Institute of Technology in 2008. 

Since September 2008, I am pursuing a PhD in Applied Automation and Computer Science at the IRCCyN laboratory ( Image and Video Communications Group), a part of Ecole Polytechnique, University of Nantes, France. My area of focus continues to be color science (even though the program name does not make it evident), and I am still looking for ways to incorporate lighting into my work. Interestingly, in the early days, many pioneers in the field of color science were originally lighting researchers! 

Research Interests

My principal area of interest is digital color imaging. A lot of my current and past work involved color appearance and vision, perceptual color processing for still images and video, image/video quality and visual psychophysics. 

Research

The thesis research, started in September 2008, focuses on color appearance and color reproduction issues as applied to various applications in the media and entertainment industry. The thesis is succinctly titled: From Color Science to Media & Entertainment Industry applications: by means of display, vision and quality models - beyond the limits of existing standards. My current project is on observer variability in modern display colorimetry.

My strength, I believe, is in my motivation and perseverance for research, coupled with an interdisciplinary background in electrical engineering, lighting and color science. Lately, my work has been guided by the industry need to understand and adopt the fundamental knowledge from the arena of basic sciences in order to develop new solutions and technologies, and/or to improve the existing ones. 

I love to do something new. My first MS thesis and my independent project was on a novel application of digital imaging in lighting control that eventually led to an independent project and subsequently a new collaboration opportunity (which unfortunately never materialized). The second MS thesis resulted in a US patent application filed by Intel Corp in 2008. My current PhD work has started to yield invention disclosures, which will hopefully lead to new intellectual properties for my company. Being involved in innovative research is a very fulfilling experience for me, and I hope to get such opportunities in future as well. Having said that, if I am asked to choose between patents and papers (assuming both options are open), I will go for papers. For a researcher, nothing can replace publications.

I am still a student, and still relatively new to this field. I continue to learn, and continue to mature as a researcher. I feel I have been fortunate so far in finding exciting research projects and career opportunities. I look forward to the future with the same expectation.

For details of my various research projects, please visit my research page.

Internships

My first internship in the field of color science was in the summer of 2006, as a college intern in the Color and Imaging Science team under Digital Printing Technologies Group, Hewlett-Packard Company in Vancouver, Washington, USA. The principal assignment was to develop a framework for conducting psychophysical image quality experiments for image quality (IQ) evaluation in the product development phase.  I developed a GUI-based software tool in Matlab that helped design and conduct psychophysical experiments. The software also analyzed the observer data and generated results in the form of graphs and tables.

In summer 2007, I worked as a Technical Intern in the Digital Home Group at Intel Corporation in Chandler, Arizona, USA.  During this internship, I was involved in the development of a new, integrated method for color and contrast enhancement. Part of the work was to conduct subjective test to evaluate the performance of the new algorithm. This was part of my MS thesis research.

My latest resume is available here ( in PDF format). 

I continue to update the contents on this and other pages. Thank you for visiting my website and hope to see you back in near future.

My contact information:

Note on internet browser: This website has been tested in Internet Explorer 8 (Win XP) with a screen resolution of 1280x800.

This page was last modified on August 29, 2009. Modified 17 times since June 17, 2006.

Copyright© Abhijit Sarkar 2009. All rights reserved.