I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Washington. My advisors are Eve Riskin and Richard Ladner. I am a member of the MobileASL project, working on the rate-distortion-complexity (R-D-C) analysis of the H.264 encoder and looking at approaches for selecting optimal encoding parameters for R-D-C optimization. My research interests include video coding and perceptual audio coding.

I obtained my Masters in Electrical Engineering at New Mexico State University in 2005. Prior to grad school, I worked at Wipro Technologies in their Multimedia and DSP group. I have interned in Nvidia, Thomson Corporate Research and Microsoft.

Publications

Journal Papers*

• "An objective metric of human subjective audio quality optimized to operate over a wide range of audio fidelities," Charles D. Creusere, Kumar D. Kallakuri and Rahul Vanam, IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, Vol.16, pp.129-136, Jan. 2008.



• "MobileASL: Intelligibility of sign language video over mobile phones," Anna Cavender, Rahul Vanam, Dane K. Barney, Richard E. Ladner and Eve A. Riskin, Disability and Rehabilitation: Assistive Technologies, London: Taylor and Francis, pp.1-13, 2007.

Conference Papers*

• "Joint Rate-Intelligibility-Complexity Optimization of an H.264 Video Encoder for American Sign Language," Rahul Vanam, Frank Ciaramello, Eve A. Riskin, Sheila S. Hemami and Richard E. Ladner, Western New York Image Processing Workshop (WNYIP), Rochester, NY, September 2009. Awarded Best Student Paper.



• "H.264/MPEG-4 AVC encoder parameter selection algorithms for complexity distortion tradeoff," Rahul Vanam, Eve A. Riskin, and Richard E. Ladner, Proc. of the IEEE Data Compression Conference, pp.372-381, Snowbird, Utah, March 2009.



• "Improved rate control and motion estimation for H.264 encoder," Loren Merritt and Rahul Vanam, Proc. of the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing, Vol.5, pp.309-312, San Antonio, TX, 2007.



• "Distortion-complexity optimization of the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC encoder using the GBFOS algorithm," Rahul Vanam, Eve A. Riskin, Sheila S. Hemami and Richard E. Ladner, Proc. of the IEEE Data Compression Conference, pp.303-312, Snowbird, Utah, March 2007.
  [Talk Slides]



• "Scalable perceptual metric for evaluating audio quality," Rahul Vanam and Charles D. Creusere, Proc. of the 39th Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems and Computers, pp.319-323, Pacific Grove, CA, 2005.
  [Talk Slides]



• "Evaluating low bitrate scalable audio quality using advanced version of PEAQ and energy equalization approach," Rahul Vanam and Charles D. Creusere, Proc. of the IEEE ICASSP, Vol.3, pp.189-192, Philadelphia, March 2005.

Master Thesis

Rahul Vanam. Scalable perceptual metric for evaluating audio impairment. M.S. thesis, Electrical and Computer Engineering, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM, USA, 2005.