STEI ITB's Colorizer Team Receives Award at the LSI Design Contest

As in previous years, STEI once again sent a representative team to the LSI Design Contest. This year, the Colorizer Team, led by Fransiskus Yoga, Esa Wibowo (El14), Ferriadi Setiawan (EL14), and Naufal Ridho (EL14), won the first runner-up award (Analog Device Award).

Starting from a Very Large Scale Integration VLSI (EL4138) college assignment, the Colorizer Team began developing a system to colorize black and white images. The work presented was entitled “COLORIZER: Image Colorization on FPGA Using Artificial Neural Network (ANN) by Applying Sliding Window Technique”. This work is a digital design that applies the sliding window technique as an alternative method to reduce complexity and memory usage in neural network circuits.

The LSI Design Contest is a digital design event held by Ryukyu Daigaku, Okinawa. This event is an annual competition that in 2018 was the 21st event. The theme presented this year is one of the fields that is being hotly developed by various academic circles, namely Backpropagation Artificial Neural Network (ANN). Artificial Neural Network is the basis of various machine learning algorithms that are widely used by well-known software companies such as Google and Microsoft. With this algorithm, computers can have the ability to learn from available data and then apply the learning results to real environments. This learning ability can be used in various fields such as robotics and biomedicine to improve system performance.

The selection process began with the submission of papers containing the presentation of the designs that had been made. Participants who passed were invited to make a presentation on March 9, 2018 at Ryukyu Daigaku, Okinawa. After going through several stages of judging, this team finally won the championship. The Integrated Circuit (IC) design made by the Colorizer Team competed against universities from various countries such as Chiba University (Japan), Kyushu Institute of Technology (Japan), Ryukyu University (Japan), Telkom University (Indonesia), University of Engineering and Technology (Vietnam) and Hanoi University of Science and Technology (Vietnam).