Professor Noel O'Connor

Noel E. O’Connor graduated from Dublin City University (DCU) with a B.Eng. in Electronic Engineering (1992) and a PhD (1998), after working for 2 years as a research assistant for Teltec Ireland at DCU. He is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Electronic Engineering. In 1999 he co-founded the Centre for Digital Video Processing (CDVP) with Prof. Alan Smeaton. Since then he has been instrumental in growing the CDVP to a 55-person research centre. This growth includes the formation of an implementation studies group that investigates low-power hardware for a variety of content-based applications.

He is a Principal Investigator in CLARITY: The Centre for Sensor Web Technologies. CLARITY is a €16.4m research centre funded by Science Foundation Ireland. CLARITY is a partnership between Dublin City University and University College Dublin, supported by research at the Tyndall National Institute (TNI) Cork. Prof. O’Connor is the Strand Leader for the Contextual Content.

Prof. O’Connor’s early research was in the field of video compression, specifically object-based compression in the context of MPEG-4, which subsequently led to an interest in video object segmentation and tracking as well as other aspects of computer vision. With the advent of MPEG-7, he became interested in audio-visual (AV) analysis for content-based information retrieval. Most recently he has developed an interest in low-power configurable hardware for AV processing, a key-enabler for next generation context-aware multimedia sensors.

Since 1999 Prof. O’Connor has published over 160 peer-reviewed publications, made 11 standards submissions, filed 5 patents and spun off a campus company, Aliope Ltd. He has a long track record of contributing to international standardization. He is the Irish representative to the world-wide ISO/IEC Moving Pictures Expert Group (MPEG) standards body. He acted as integrator for the software implementation of MPEG-4 that now forms an informative annex to the standard and was part of a small team whose technology proposal to MPEG-7 was selected as the starting point for the standard. He has acted as PC Chair for 3 international conferences (CIVR 2004, SAMT 2006 & WIAMIS 2007) and is a PC member for many international conferences. HE regularly reviews for a number of respected journals in his field. He was an expert evaluator for EU FP6 and FP7 ICT proposals and has acted as a reviewer for specific projects for both the EU and Enterprise Ireland.