Ping-Chang Shih received the 2013 Outreach for Engineers Scholarship for the Specialty Outreach Forum and the 32nd International Conference on Ocean, Offshore, and Arctic Engineering, which was held June 9-14 in Nantes, France. This conference is sponsored by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

A Ph.D. student in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Georgia Tech, Mr. Shih is co-advised by ECE Professor Anthony J. Yezzi and Civil and Environmental Engineering Associate Professor Francesco Fedele.

Mr. Shih is developing an approach to improve the accuracy of vision-based ocean surface reconstruction systems. During the last five years, he and his advisors have been developing a system known as VWASS (Variational Wave Acquisition Stereo System), where variational stereo computer vision principles are used to reconstruct the ocean surface. A crucial factor that determines the accuracy of the reconstruction is the camera parameters. These parameters constitute an arithmetical comparison between the reconstruction and the image measurements so that the reconstruction can “grow” to approximate the images. His research involves refining the camera parameters to improve the accuracy of the variational ocean surface reconstruction generated through VWASS.