Andreea Pocol

I am a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Waterloo, specializing in the intersection of Digital Image Processing and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). I am supervised by Lesley Istead and Craig S. Kaplan. My doctoral research explores the cinematic language of colour, bridging the gap between computational scale and human perception. I leverage Big Data to identify long-term aesthetic trends across tens of thousands of films, applying digital image processing to extract and quantify pixel-level colour data. Ultimately, my work integrates Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) principles to investigate the psycho-physical impact of colour grading, decoding how these techniques are engineered to evoke specific emotional responses.

Research Interests

My thesis research is on Computational Cinematography and Data-Driven Visual Analysis. I am particularly interested in:

• Big Data: Mining large-scale datasets to reveal longitudinal patterns in visual storytelling.
• Digital image processing: Developing custom pipelines for frame-by-frame, pixel-based analysis of movie frames for cinematographic colour palettes.
• Human-computer interaction: Analyzing the intersection of colour theory and human psychology to understand how specific grading choices modulate viewer emotions.

Recent Publications

• Colour-Based Movie Recommendations Proceedings of Graphics Interface 2026, October 2026

• Binned-KMeans: Extracting Memorable, Explainable, Weighted and Sorted Colour Palettes from Videos International Conference on Content-Based Multimedia Indexing (CBMI), October 2025

• An Evaluation of Gender Bias in 167K Movie Posters Intelligent Systems and Applications (Springer Nature Switzerland), July 2024

Resume

As I approach the completion of my Ph.D., I am actively seeking academic faculty positions or industrial research roles!