Rohan Reddy Sambidi received admission offers with scholarships upto $16,500

Rohan Reddy Sambidi from Btech CSE at SRM University-AP is delighted to have received admission offers from numerous universities abroad. He secured admission to MS in Computer Science at Purdue University, Fort Wayne; Texas A&M University, College Station (Distance); Arizona State University, Tempe; Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago; University of South Florida, Tampa; and the University of Houston. Along with this, he received an offer from the University of Maryland, College Park for the Master of Professional Studies in Machine Learning programme. Admission offers came with a scholarship of $10,000 from ASU and $16,500 from IIT Chicago.

The suitable choice

Rohan has decided to join the MS in Computer Science programme at Arizona State University. He plans to prepare a thesis and focus his research on the field of machine learning. He wants to explore and address the challenges of designing efficient deep learning algorithms for space exploration through telescopic imagery. He is also interested in doing a few courses on theoretical computer science.

Finding the best

For selecting universities, Rohan started by acquiring a list of reputed universities from the QS Rankings website. Then he shortlisted universities by focusing on the course curriculum, faculty, and resources for student research. He has completed his bachelor’s degree at SRM university-AP with a major in Computer Science and Engineering and a minor in Physics.

Support from SRM AP

The mentorship of accomplished faculty has helped Rohan build strong foundational knowledge in his discipline. Through the course projects, UROP, and the Capstone Project, he has developed research skills and built a compelling profile essential for admission to leading universities in the USA. He expressed his gratitude to his professors and mentors, Prof Dr Ragunathan T, Dr Jatindra Kumar Dash, and Dr Murali Krishna Enduri, for their relentless guidance. He is immensely grateful for the opportunities that he received from SRM university-AP.

Two research papers from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering were presented at the 4th International Conference on Energy, Power, and Environment held from April 29 to May 1, 2022. Assistance professor V M Manikandan and three BTech students participated in the conference organised by NIT Meghalaya, India. The papers will be published in IEEE Xplore Digital Library (Scopus Indexed).

Third-year BTech CSE student Harshad Dhane presented the paper A Novel High Capacity Reversible Data Hiding through Encryption Scheme by Permuting Encryption Key and Entropy Analysis, co-authored by Palak Agarwal, third-year BTech student, and Dr V M Manikandan. The reversible data hiding scheme proposed by the research can be used in the healthcare sector to transmit electronic patient reports along with medical images. Improving the embedding rate of the reversible data hiding is the further plan of the researchers.

Explanation of the research

A Reversible Data Hiding Through Encryption (RDTE) scheme will consider an original image and a sequence of bits as the input and generate an encrypted image as the output. This encrypted image will be able to transmit through the network securely, and the authorized receiver can take out the hidden details along with the restoration of the actual image. This paper proposes a new RDTE scheme with a good rate of embedding without any issues during the restoration of the original image. The researchers used the well-known RC4 pseudo-random generator for the image encryption and performed data hiding during block-wise image encryption. In the proposed scheme, the original image is considered non-overlapping blocks of size BXB pixels, and these blocks will be encrypted using a sequence of pseudo-random integers. During the RDTE process, all the possible unique permutations of the encryption key, K, will be generated, say (K0, K1,…, KN). Further, the sender will be capable of embedding one integer value from the set {0, 1, …,N} in a selected image block. A selected block will be encrypted using the pseudo-random sequence of integers using the key K_Q to embed the integer Q in the selected block. The proposed scheme prefers to select keys with unique characters with sufficient length to ensure the maximum embedding capacity. The message extraction and image restoration are performed by analysing the entropy measure from each block after attempting the decryption.

The paper presented by second year BTech CSE student Sri Satya Maram is titled A Novel System for Automated Coloring of Neat Sketches and was co-authored by Dr V M Manikandan. The research introduces a new algorithm to colour a given neat sketch. The proposed algorithm can be used to colour drawings to create animated movies or to colour the designs developed by the designers. The researchers plan to develop artistic features on the coloured image for better visual appearance.

Explanation of the research

The process of colouring neat sketches is a significant activity when making animated movies or for better visualization in computer modelling. The colour filling tools are widely available in almost all the image/video editing software, which will help us pick a colour from a colour palette and can be filled in a selected region. This process is known as flat colouring. The flat colouring process has several challenges. One of the significant challenges is that the colour may leak from the selected regions to neighbouring regions if there are some small openings on the contours. The second concern while using flat colouring is that the designated areas will be filled entirely with the same colour, so the drawing will not have an artistic look. The research proposes a new software application that will take a neat sketch as the input, and the system will generate a coloured drawing as the output. In the proposed scheme, the researchers have converted the given sketch to a grayscale or binary image and applied image dilation operation to fill the small open spaces in the contours (if any). Further, the closed regions are identified and coloured with a predefined set of colours or random colour combinations. While colouring the regions, the proposed system will ensure that the adjacent regions will not be coloured with the same colours. A number of sketches have been considered during the experimental study, and the results are validated manually.