Laboratoire Hubert Curien UMR CNRS 5516

ERIS

The research topic ERIS was started within Laboratoire Hubert Curien in 2009 as the research component of the Rhône-Alpes subsidiary of Institut d’Optique – Graduate School, which at Saint-Etienne operates in partnership with Université Jean-Monnet de Saint-Etienne. Under the responsibility of Pierre Chavel, who is being seconded part time from the Institut d’Optique headquarter, ERIS consists of six faculty members (J.M. Becker, M. Flury, Th. Fournel, M. Hébert, M. Jourlin, Th. Lépine), one CNRS research scientist (I. Verrier), and ten doctoral students, of which five are on industrial cooperative projects under the CIFRE programme. The ERIS activities are organized as three “research projects”: • “Illumination – visual rendering”: the way manufactured objects look to the human eye or to a camera depends on illumination conditions, on scattering and on polarisation. ERIS strives to built realistic models accounting for those effects within affordable computing times. In parallel, mostly within industrial collaborative projects, ERIS uses “mathematical morphology” to improve the interpretation by a human observer of images that were acquired under unfavourable conditions. • “Optical imaging”: optical engineering skills – optical design, diffraction, photometry – are central to ERIS and are involved in essentially all its research activities. It allows to address problems of interest to medical imaging and instrumentation in cooperation with Hôpital Nord at Saint-Etienne. “Opto-numerical security”: fighting counterfeiting is known to be an economic challenge with a growing importance. ERIS combines optical instrumentation means and mathematical information coding techniques to develop original authentication procedures for manufactured objects and valuable documents