This talk presents an overview of some advances in two broad research areas in image analysis and computer vision and in related nonlinear systems. The first area deals with some major problems in sign language recognition including efficient algorithms for visual processing and the development of multimodal subunits, data-driven or phonetically-based, that provide a temporal sequential structure and allow for both temporal segmentation as well as automatic recognition and signer adaptation in continuous sign language videos. The talk will address several topics in multimodality such as motion-position cues, handshapes, and facial events. The second area deals with variational formulations of some powerful nonlinear geometric approaches to image analysis mainly based on morphological operators on lattices and on graphs as well as on active contours related to nonlinear energy-based texture flows. The applications of the second area include shape processing in sign videos as well as multiscale simplification and segmentation of arbitrary images.
Petros Maragos received the Diploma in E.E. from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) in 1980 and the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from Georgia Tech, Atlanta, in 1982 and 1985. In 1985, he joined the faculty of the Division of Applied Sciences at Harvard University, where he worked for eight years as professor of electrical engineering affiliated with the Harvard Robotics Lab. In 1993, he joined the faculty of the School of ECE at Georgia Tech. During periods of 1996-98 he had a joint appointment as director of research at the Institute of Language and Speech Processing in Athens. Since 1998, he has been working as a professor at the NTUA School of ECE. His research and teaching interests include signal processing, systems theory, pattern recognition, and their applications to image processing and computer vision, audio, speech and language processing, cognitive systems, and robotics. He has served as: Associate Editor for the IEEE Trans. on ASSP, IEEE Trans. on PAMI, and editorial board member and guest editor for several journals on signal processing, image analysis and vision; co-organizer of several conferences and workshops, including VCIP'92, ISMM'96, VLBV'01, MMSP'07, ECCV'10, EUSIPCO'12; member of the IEEE committees on DSP, IMDSP and MMSP.
His is the recipient or co-recipient of several awards, including a 1983 Sigma Xi best thesis award, a 1987-1992 National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award, the 1988 IEEE SPS Young Author Best Paper Award for the paper `Morphological Filters',the 1994 IEEE SPS Senior Best Paper Award and the 1995 IEEE W.R.G. Baker Prize Award for the paper `Energy Separation in Signal Modulations with Application to Speech Analysis', the 1996 Pattern Recognition Society's Honorable Mention Award for the paper `Min-Max Classifiers', the EURASIP 2007 Technical Achievement Award for contributions to nonlinear signal, image and speech processing, and the Best Paper Award of the IEEE CVPR-2011 Gesture Recognition Workshop. He was elected a Fellow of IEEE in 1995 and of EURASIP in 2010 for his research contributions.
