Eye for image
By Alexandra George
Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder when it comes to image displays. Instead, sophisticated technologies come into play to present images with the best possible quality. It takes a certain eye and mind to work on display technology, and ECE alumnus
To recognize Balram’s influence on display image quality, the Society for Information Display (SID) has awarded him the 2016 Otto Schade Prize. The Otto Schade, Karl Ferdinand Braun and Jan Rajchman prizes are the three biggest
The Otto Schade Prize recognizes outstanding contributions to the functional performance and/or image quality of information displays. Balram was awarded the prize “for his outstanding contributions to image, video, and display processing technology, and for development of objective image-quality benchmarking methodology that helped bring world-class image quality to mainstream consumer displays.”
As President and CEO of Ricoh Innovations Corp., a Silicon Valley company that creates new technologies and businesses based on advanced information technology for Ricoh Company Ltd., he has had significant experience in the industry pursuing his goal — creating the best image for the viewer. His contributions have been implemented across military, professional, and consumer products, and he is responsible for bringing high-end quality video to mainstream displays.
One of his significant developments is a set of high-quality, award-winning, and low-cost video processing algorithms and architectures. These have gone into hundreds of millions of consumer video electronics products, as well as into a broad range of high-end video and display systems.
“For example, a large percentage of video entertainment systems used in private aircraft use video processing chips developed by my teams,” said Balram. “When some very famous people watch video while flying in their private planes, that video is processed by my algorithms and chips.”
He also developed a method for enabling system transfer function analysis for
The prize is a significant
“While many people win prestigious prizes in research and technology or in business and marketing,” said Balram, “I am fortunate to be in a relatively rare group that has won both types of awards.”
With over twenty years of experience in the industry, he is known as an expert innovator in advanced information and display technologies. But his influence does not stop in industry. As an adjunct professor of electrical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, visiting professor of vision science at the University of California, Berkeley, and a guest professor of design and innovation at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Gandhinagar, India, Balram is well-revered in academia, and brings his expertise to the classroom to train the future developers of the display industry.
“I have really enjoyed working on the whole path of visual processing from image creation and processing all the way to