PhD Enhancement of Visual Task Performance in Scotopic Lighting Conditions

Founded in 1614, the University of Groningen enjoys an international reputation as a dynamic and innovative institution of higher education offering high-quality teaching and research. Flexible study programmes and academic career opportunities in a wide variety of disciplines encourage the 36,000 students and researchers alike to develop their own individual talents. As one of the best research universities in Europe, the University of Groningen has joined forces with other top universities and networks worldwide to become a truly global center of knowledge.

Within the Faculty of Science and Engineering, a 4-years PhD position is available at the Bernoulli Institute for Mathematics, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence with the topic of analysis and enhancement of visual task performance under scotopic illumination conditions. The candidate would become a member of the Scientific Visualization and Computer Graphics Group (SVCG) of the Computer Science Department and will work under the daily supervision of Dr. Cara Tursun.

The effects of poor illumination conditions can be observed at both low-level perception such as the well-known Contrast Sensitivity Function (CSF) of the human eye and at later stages of visual processing in the human brain such as shape and motion perception. More complex tasks requiring cognitive processing and visual-motor coordination such as reading, visual search, and night-time driving depend on the information provided by the early stages of vision in the brain and they are also affected by the poor lighting conditions. Inferior human visual performance under non-ideal illumination conditions has been well-known for a long time and there have been hardware solutions proposed to address the issue such as image intensifiers. However, research focusing on the analysis of different types of image enhancements under hardware/software, natural image, and perceptual constraints is missing. The lack of perceptual research in improving scotopic visual performance and the increasing accessibility of novel display technologies such as AR/VR are the main motivations for focusing our research efforts in this direction. The main goal of this project is to analyze the visual task performance under poor lighting conditions and propose image enhancement solutions for Head Mounted Displays (HMD) such optical see-through AR displays or mixed reality VR displays.
The objective of the temporary position is the production of a number of research articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals and conference proceedings, which together will form the basis of a thesis leading to a PhD degree (Dr) at the University of Groningen.

The successful candidate should:

• have a keen interest in pursuing fundamental and interdisciplinary research at visual perception, psychophysics, statistics, numerical optimization, computer vision, and computer graphics
• have a master’s degree or equivalent in computer science or another relevant field
• have great programming and analytical skills
• be able to design and implement efficient algorithms, identify the bottlenecks in the implementation and improve run-time and/or memory complexity
• have experience or motivation to get familiar with common programming languages, libraries, game engines, and software such as Python, C/C++, C#, PyTorch, Tensorflow, NumPy, SciPy, PsychoPy, OpenGL, Unity, Unreal Engine, and LaTeX.

We offer you, following the Collective Labour Agreement for Dutch Universities:

• a salary of € 2,443 gross per month in the first year, up to a maximum of € 3,122 gross per month in the fourth and final year for a full-time working week
• a holiday allowance of 8% gross annual income and an 8.3% year-end bonus
• a full-time position (1.0 FTE). The successful candidate will first be offered a temporary position of one year with the option of renewal for another three years. Prolongation of the contract is contingent on sufficient progress in the first year to indicate that a successful completion of the PhD thesis within the next three years is to be expected. A PhD training programme is part of the agreement, and the successful candidate will be enrolled in the Graduate School of Science and Engineering.

For information you can contact:

Dr Cara Tursun,   [email protected]

(please do not use the email addresses above for applications)