Sandra Skaff, Ph.D.
Member of Research Staff
Sandra Skaff received her PhD and MEng. degrees from McGill University, Montreal, Canada in 2009 and 2002 respectively. She received the B.S. in Computer Science from the American University of Beirut with distinction in 2000.
Sandra joined Xerox Research Center Webster in 2011 after having completed an 18-month postdoc at Xerox Research Centre Europe where she worked on color and image-based applications for applied visual aesthetics. In the space, she has four patents pending.
Her research interests include color and computer vision, image processing, and multi-/hyperspectral imaging. One of her current projects is on exploring the use of spectral features for different applications within the area of transportation. She is also Liaison Manager for a Xerox-EPFL collaboration which started in May 2010.
Sandra has received two paper awards and two poster awards for her work at national and international conferences. In 2005, she received a Precarn Scholar Award, which was meant to develop highly qualified personnel in the Canadian Intelligent Systems community. Sandra is a member of the IEEE as well as the Imaging Science and Technology society, for which she serves on the council of the Rochester chapter. She is also on the Leadership Team of the Monroe County Women Alliance, a Xerox Corporation Caucus Group.
Outside work Sandra enjoys playing the piano, step aerobics, the outdoors, and most of all traveling.
Publications
Peer-Reviewed Journal Publications
Csurka, G., Skaff, S., Marchesotti, L., and Saunders, C. "Building Look & Feel Concept Models from Color Combinations - with applications in image classification, retrieval, and color transfer". Special Issue on ICVGIP 2010 in Journal of the Visual Computer 27.12 (2011): 1039-1053.
Skaff, S. and Clark, J.J. "Spectral Color Constancy using a Maximum Entropy Approach." Journal of the Optical Society of America A 28.11 (2011): 2385-2399.
Clark, J.J. and Skaff, S. "A Spectral Theory of Color Perception." Journal of the Optical Society of America A 26.12 (2009): 2488-2502.
Skaff, S., Arbel, T., and Clark, J.J. "A Sequential Bayesian Approach to Color Constancy using Non-Uniform Filters." Computer Vision and Image Understanding 113.9 (2009): 993-1004.
Selected Peer-Reviewed Conference Publications
Skaff, S., Marchesotti, L., Csurka, G., and Saunders, C. "A Study on Perceptually Coherent Distance Measures for Color Schemes." IS&T/SID’s Color and Imaging Conference (2011).
Murray, N., Skaff, S., Marchesotti, L., and Perronnin, F. "Towards Automatic Concept Transfer." International Symposium on Non-Photorealistic Animation and Rendering held in conjunction with ACM SIGGRAPH (2011). Best Theory Paper Award
Csurka, G., Skaff, S., Marchesotti, L., and Saunders, C. "Learning Moods and Emotions from Color Combinations." Indian Conference on Computer Vision, Graphics, and Image Processing (2010). Honorable Mention, Best Paper Award
Skaff, S. and Clark, J.J. "Maximum Entropy Spectral Models for Color Constancy in the Presence of Interreflections." IS&T/SID's Color Imaging Conference (2008): 215-220.
Skaff, S., Clark, J.J., and Rekleitis, I. "Estimating Surface Reflectance Spectra for Underwater Color Vision." British Machine Vision Conference 2 (2008): 1015-1024.
Au, C., Skaff, S., and Clark, J.J. "Anomaly Detection for Video Surveillance Applications." IEEE International Conference on Pattern Recognition 4 (2006): 888-891.