A paper written by PhD student Guo Li and master’s student Wu Yingwen from the Faculty of Science and Technology (FST), University of Macau (UM), received the Best Student Paper Award - First Place and the only Best Paper Award in Theory, respectively, at the 2016 International Conference on Fuzzy Theory and Its Applications (iFuzzy2016).

The students’ paper, titled ‘Image Guided Fuzzy C-Means for Image Segmentation’, focuses on image segmentation, a fundamental technique in computer vision that is widely used in vision-based artificial intelligence tasks, as in the case of self-driving cars and medical image understanding. However, images of poor quality like the medical ones obtained via X-Ray or Ultrasound are difficult for computers to analyse. This paper proposes an image segmentation method based on fuzzy theory to solve this problem and increase the computers’ capability to understand low-quality images.

The paper is co-authored with FST Assistant Professor Chen Long and Dean Philip Chen. Approximately 100 papers have been presented at this year’s conference.