Welcome!

I am Esteban, a Research Scientist at the Laboratory for Engineering Non-Traditional Sensors (LENS) at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Duke University. Formerly, I was Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Arizona in Tucson. I completed my Phd in Electrical Engineering at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Center for Optics and Photonics, University of Concepcion, Chile. My research is devoted to several aspects of Computational Sensing and Imaging, from image formation, optical modeling, image reconstruction and restoration, compressive imaging, coded aperture imaging, high resolution high pixel count imaging, superresolution, etc.

Contact Email: esteban.vera@duke.edu

Research Interests

Computational Sensing.
Gigapixel Cameras.
Image Acquisition: CCD/CMOS/IRFPA Detectors & Controllers.
Image and Video Processing: Restoration, Deconvolution, Superresolution.
Infrared Image Processing: Non-Uniformity Correction (NUC).
Computational Photography.
Adaptive and Compressed Sensing.
Scientific Instrumentation: Optical Tweezers, Capillary Electrophoresis.
Astronomical Technology: Optical, Infrared and Radio Telescopes & Instrumentation.

Publications

Journals

E. Vera, M. Vega, R. Molina, and A.K. Katsaggelos, “Iterative Image Restoration using Non-stationary Priors”, Applied Optics, Vol. 52, Issue 10, pp. D102-D110.
D. Golish, E. Vera, K. Kelly, Q. Gong, P. Jansen, J. Hughes, D. Kittle, D. Brady, and M. Gehm, “Development of a Scalable Image Formation Pipeline for Multiscale Gigapixel Photography”, Optics Express, Vol. 20, Issue 20, pp. 22048-22062, 2012.
D. Townsend, P. Poon, S. Wehrwein, T. Osman, A. Mariano, E. Vera, M. Stenner, and M. Gehm, “Compressive Target Tracking”, Optics Express, Vol. 20, Issue 19, pp. 21160-21172, 2012.
D. Brady, M. Gehm, R. Stack, D. Marks, D. Kittle, D. Golish, E. Vera and S. Feller, “Multiscale Gigapixel Photography”, Nature, Vol. 486 , Issue 7403, pp. 386-389, 2012.
E. Vera, P. Meza, and S. Torres, “Total Variation Approach for Adaptive Nonuniformity Correction in Focal-plane Arrays”, Optics Letters, Vol. 36, Issue 2, pp. 172-174, 2011.
J.P. Staforelli, J.M. Brito, E. Vera, P. Solano and A. Lencina, “A Clustered Speckle approach to Optical Trapping ”, Optics Communications, Volume 283, Issue 23, pp. 4722-4726, 2010.
J.P. Staforelli, E. Vera, J.M. Brito, P. Solano, S. Torres and C. Saavedra, “Superresolution Imaging in Optical Tweezers using High-Speed Cameras”, Optics Express, vol. 18, No. 4, pp. 3322-3331, 2010.
M. Boccas, T. Vucina, C. Araya, E. Vera and C. Ahhee, "Protected-silver coatings for the 8-m Gemini telescope mirrors", Thin Solid Films, vol. 502 (1-2), pp. 275-280, 2006.
E. Vera and S. Torres, “Fast Adaptive Non-uniformity Correction for Infrared Focal-Plane Array Detectors”, EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing, vol. 2005, Issue 13, pp. 1994-2004, 2005.

Conferences

M. Dunlop, P. Poon, D. Golish, E. Vera, and M. Gehm, “Calibration Challenges and Initial Experimental Demonstration of an Adaptive, Feature-Specific Spectral Imaging Classifier”, OSA Computational Optical Sensing and Imaging (COSI), Arlington, VA, June 2013.
E. Vera, D. Golish, Q. Gong, K. Kelly, D. Kittle, S. Feller, D. Brady, and M. Gehm, “Color Image Formation for Multiscale Gigapixel Imaging”, OSA Imaging Systems and Applications (IS), Arlington, VA, June 2013.
E. Vera, D. Golish, Q. Gong, D. Kittle, S. Feller, D. Brady, and M. Gehm, “Efficient Model-based Tonemapping of High Dynamic Range Gigapixel Images”, OSA Computational Optical Sensing and Imaging (COSI), Arlington, VA, June 2013.
D.J. Brady, D. Marks, S. Feller, M. Gehm, D. Golish, E. Vera, D. Kittle , “Petapixel Photography and the Limits of Camera Information Capacity”, Proceedings of the SPIE, IS&T/SPIEs Electronic Imaging, San Francisco, CA, February 2013.
P. Poon, E. Vera and M.E. Gehm, “Advances in the Design, Calibration and Use of a Static Coded Aperture Compressive Tracking and Imaging System”, OSA Computational Optical Sensing and Imaging (COSI), Monterey, CA, June 2012.
D. Golish, E. Vera, K. Kelly, Q. Gong, P. Jansen, J. Hughes, D.S. Kittle, D.J. Brady and M.E. Gehm, “ Challenges in Gigapixel Multiscale Image Formation”, OSA Imaging Systems and Applications (IS), Monterey, CA, June 2012.
E. Vera et al., “Image Deblurring using Nonstationary Priors”, Poster presented at the International Conference on Computational Photography (ICCP), Seattle, WA, April 2012.
P.K. Poon, D. Townsend, S. Wehrwein, E.M. Vera, M.D. Stenner and M.E. Gehm, “A Static Architecture for Compressive Target Tracking”, Proceedings of the SPIE, Vol. 8360, SPIE Defense, Security, and Sensing Symposium (DSS), Baltimore, MD, April 2012.
E. Vera, M. Vega, R. Molina and A.K. Katsaggelos, “ A Novel Iterative Image Restoration Algorithm using Nonstationary Image Priors”, Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), Brussels, Belgium, September 2011.
D. Golish, E. Vera, K. Kelly, Q. Gong, D.J. Brady and M.E. Gehm, “Image Formation in Multiscale Optical Systems”, OSA Imaging Systems and Applications (IS), Toronto, Canada, July 2011.
M.E. Gehm, D. Golish, E. Vera, J. Han, D. Marks and D.J. Brady, “Image Formation Challenges in the MOSAIC Platform”, Proceedings of the SPIE, Vol. 8056, SPIE Defense, Security, and Sensing Symposium (DSS), Orlando, FL, April 2011.
P. Meza, C. San Martin, E. Vera and S. Torres, “A Quantitative Evaluation of Fixed-Pattern Noise Reduction Methods in Imaging Systems”, Lecture Notes in Computer Science Vol. 6419, pp. 285-294, 5th Iberoamerican Congress on Pattern Recognition (CIARP), Sao Paulo, Brazil, November 2010.
E. Vera, P. Meza and S. Torres, “Total Variation Adaptive Nonuniformity Correction in Focal-Plane Arrays”, OSA Imaging Science (IS), Tucson, AZ, June 2010.
J.P. Staforelli, J.M. Brito, E. Vera, S. Torres and C. Saavedra, “Superresolution Imaging and Force Characterization in Optical Tweezers using High-Speed Cameras”, OSA Frontiers in Optics (FIO), San Jose, CA, October 2009.
E. Vera, L. Mancera, S.D. Babacan, R. Molina, and A.K. Katsaggelos, “ Bayesian Compressive Sensing of Wavelet coefficients using multiscale Laplacian priors”, Proceedings of the IEEE Workshop on Statistical Signal Processing (SSP), Cardiff, UK, August 2009.
E. Vera and S. Torres, “Subpixel Accuracy Analysis of Phase Correlation Registration Methods Applied to Aliased Imagery”, Proceedings of the European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO), Lausanne, Switzerland, August 2008.
E. Vera and S. Torres, “Adaptive Color Space Transform Using Independent Component Analysis”, Proceedings of the SPIE, Vol. 6497, IS&T/SPIEs 19th Annual Symposium on Electronic Imaging Science & Technology, San Jose, CA, January 2007.
M. Boccas, T. Vucina, C. Araya, C. Ah’hee and E. Vera, “Coating the 8-m Gemini Telescopes with Protected Silver”, Proceedings of the SPIE, vol. 5494, pp. 239-253, SPIE's International Symposium on Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation, Glasgow, UK, June 2004.
E. Vera and S. Torres, “Ghosting Reduction in Adaptive Non-uniformity Correction of Infrared Focal-Plane Array Image Sequences”, Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), vol. II, pp. 1001-1004, Barcelona, Spain, September 2003.
S. Torres, E. Vera and R. Reeves, “Adaptive Scene-Based NUC Method for Infrared Focal-Plane Arrays”, Proceedings of the SPIE, vol. 5076, pp. 130-139, SPIE's 17th Annual International Symposium on Aerospace/Defense Sensing, Simulation, and Controls (Aerosense), Orlando, FL, 2003.
E. Vera, R. Reeves and S. Torres. ”Adaptive Bias Non-Uniformity Correction on Infrared Focal-Plane Array Detectors”, in Soft Computing Systems: Design, Management and Applications, pp. 725-734, IOS Press, Hybrid and Intelligent Systems, Santiago, Chile, 2002.