Students from International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad (IIIT Hyderabad) achieved notable success at the first edition of ICEdge 2025, an international conference on AIoT and Edge Intelligence held at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru from 18 to 20 December. The event brought together leading researchers and industry experts from across the world.
From over 200 regular paper submissions and 20 shortlisted demos, IIIT Hyderabad students secured two prestigious awards, reflecting the institute’s strong focus on impactful, system-level research.
The Best Student Paper Award (First Place) was conferred for the work titled “Edge-Based Object Classification Using mmWave Radar on Qualcomm Innovators Development Kit” by Sri Rama Rathan Reddy Koluguri, Akshat Puneet, and Dr. Abhishek Srivastava. The paper was recognized for its effective integration of mmWave sensing, signal processing, and embedded AI for edge intelligence applications.
Here is the summary of the research work as explained by the authors:
Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) radars are emerging as a reliable solution for object classification, having consistent performance under varying environmental conditions, unlike traditional Lidar and camera-based approaches. This paper presents an end-to-end object classification pipeline using point cloud data from an FMCW radar, deployed on the Qualcomm Innovators Development Kit (QIDK), demonstrating its suitability for embedded, Machine Learning and real-time interfaces. A PCA+SVM based classifier is used in the proposed system to enable efficient on-device inference with lower computational overhead. Experimental evaluation on a custom-made dataset containing over 11,000 samples shows an accuracy of 96.23%, with an inference latency of less than 25.9 milliseconds and a model size of 69.91 MB, demonstrating the suitability of the proposed approach for real-time, on-device object classification in smart mobility applications and intelligent sensing platforms.
In addition, the AIoT Innovator Award was awarded for the demonstration “Non-Contact Multi-Subject Vitals Monitoring using 77 GHz mmWave FMCW Radar” by Sri Rama Rathan Reddy Koluguri, Ravi Theja Kolluru, Hrikesh Gawas, and Dr. Abhishek Srivastava. The work showcased a non-invasive, multi-subject health monitoring system and was appreciated for its societal relevance and robust system implementation.
Here is the summary of the research work as explained by the authors:
Conventional contact-based technologies for vital sign monitoring are often intrusive, uncomfortable, and susceptible to hygiene and calibration challenges. To address these limitations, this work employs a Frequency-Modulated Continuous-Wave (FMCW) radar–based approach. FMCW radars, offering millimeter-level displacement sensitivity, are increasingly adopted in healthcare applications for non-contact monitoring of vital signs such as heart rate (HR) and breath rate (BR). In this demonstration, real-time monitoring of HR and BR for multiple subjects within the radar’s field of view, up to a range of 7 m, was successfully achieved. Experimental results indicate that the proposed system attains an accuracy exceeding 95.26% for HR estimation and 98.47% for BR estimation, with an end-to-end latency of less than 2 ms.
These achievements highlight IIIT Hyderabad’s strengths in interdisciplinary research across hardware, signal processing, and artificial intelligence, and its emphasis on translating research into real-world solutions.
Acknowledgement: Students acknowledge the support from iHub Data-IIIT Hyderabad; Qualcomm; the Chips to Startup (C2S) program of MeitY, Government of India; and the Department of Science and Technology (DST), Government of India, under the PURSE scheme.
Homepage: https://icedge.org/
December 2025