Professor Josef Kittler FREng

Director of the Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing
B.A. in Electrical Engineering, 1971,
Ph.D. in Pattern Recognition, 1974 and
ScD in 1992, all from the University of Cambridge.

Background

Josef Kittler has been a Research Assistant in the Engineering Department of Cambridge University (1973--75), SERC Research Fellow at the University of Southampton (1975-77), Royal Society European Research Fellow, Ecole Nationale Superieure des Telecommuninations, Paris (1977--78), IBM Research Fellow, Balliol College, Oxford (1978--80), Principal Research Associate, SERC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (1980--84) and Principal Scientific Officer, SERC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (1985).

He also worked as the SERC Coordinator for Pattern Analysis (1982), and was Rutherford Research Fellow in Oxford University, Dept. Engineering Science (1985).

He joined the Department of Electrical Engineering of Surrey University in 1986 as a Reader in Information Technology, and became Professor of Machine Intelligence in 1991. He gained the title Distinguished Professor in 2004.

He is the Course Organiser for the MSc Course in Signal Processing and Machine Intelligence. He teaches Machine Intelligence, Pattern Recognition and Advanced Signal Processing.

Research Interests

He worked on various theoretical aspects of Pattern Recognition, Image Analysis and Computer Vision, and on many applications including System Identification, Automatic Inspection, ECG diagnosis, Mammographic Image Interpretation, Remote Sensing, Robotics, Speech Recognition, Character Recognition and Document Processing, Image Coding, Biometrics, Image and Video Database Retrieval, Surveillance. Contributions to statistical pattern recognition include k-nearest neighbour methods of pattern classification, feature selection, contextual classification, probabilistic relaxation and most recently to multiple expert fusion. In computer vision the major contributions include robust statistical methods for shape analysis and detection, motion estimation and segmentation, and image segmentation by thresholding and edge detection.

He has co-authored a book with the title `Pattern Recognition: a statistical approach' published by Prentice-Hall. He has published more than 500 papers.

Achievements and Honours

Received Best Paper awards from the Pattern Recognition Society, the British Machine Vision Association and IEE.

Received ``Honorary Medal'' from the Electrotechnical Faculty of the Czech Technical University in Prague in September 1995 for contributions to the field of pattern recognition and computer vision.

Elected Fellow of the International Association for Pattern Recognition in 1998

Elected Fellow of Institution of Electrical Engineers in 1999

Received Honorary Doctorate from the Lappeenranta University of Technology, Finland, for contributions to Pattern Recognition and Computer Vision in 1999

Elected Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, 2000

Received Institution of Electrical Engineers Achievemments Medal 2002 for outstanding contributions to Visual Information Engineering

Elected BMVA Distinguished Fellow 2002

Received, from the Czech Academy of Sciences, the 2003 Bernard Bolzano Honorary Medal for Merit in the Mathematical Sciences

Awarded the title Distinguished Professor of the University of Surrey in 2004

Appointed as Series Editor for Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science 2004

Awarded the KS Fu Prize 2006, by the International Association for Pattern Recognition, for outstanding contributions to Pattern Recognition (the prize awarded biennially)

Received Honorary Doctorate from the Czech Technical University in Prague in 2007, on the occasion of the 300th anniversary of its foundation.

Awarded the IET Faraday Medal 2008.

Consultancy and Enterprise

Consulted for many companies including British Telecom, British Gas, Mars International, De La Rue, Autohelm, Philips, BP, Shell, Ericsson, Durlacher, Ikonisys.

He was a co-founder of OmniPerception Ltd in 2001 and served as Chairman between 2001-2005. Since 2005 he has chaired the OmniPerception Advisory Group.

Professional Activities

He served as a member of the Editorial Board of IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence during 1982-85. Currently serves on the Editorial Boards of Pattern Recognition Letters, Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence, Pattern Analysis and Applications.

He served on the Governing Board of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR) as one of the two British representatives during the period 1982-2005. He was the President of the IAPR during 1994-1996. Currently he s a member of the KS Fu Prize Committee of IAPR.

J.Kittler@surrey.ac.uk
May 2009