Pietro Perona

Last updated
Pietro Perona
Perona casis2014 (cropped).jpg
2014 at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Born (1961-09-03) 3 September 1961 (age 62) [1]
Nationality Italian, American
Alma mater University of Padua
University of California, Berkeley (1990, PhD)
Known for Computer vision
Machine learning
Cognitive neuroscience
Awards Longuet-Higgins Prize (2013), Koenderink Prize (2010)
Scientific career
Fields Computer Science
Institutions California Institute of Technology
Doctoral advisor Jitendra Malik
Doctoral students Fei-Fei Li
Jean-Yves Bouguet
Stefano Soatto
Website www.vision.caltech.edu/Perona.html

Pietro Perona (born 3 September 1961) is an Italian-American educator and computer scientist. He is the Allan E. Puckett Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computation and Neural Systems at the California Institute of Technology and director of the National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center in Neuromorphic Systems Engineering. He is known for his research in computer vision and is the director of the Caltech Computational Vision Group. [2]

Contents

Academic biography

Perona obtained his D.Eng. in electrical engineering cum laude from the University of Padua in 1985 and completed his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley in 1990. [1] [3] His dissertation was titled Finding Texture and Brightness Boundaries in Images, and his adviser was Jitendra Malik. [4] In 1990, Perona was a postdoctoral fellow at the International Computer Science Institute at Berkeley. From 1990 to 1991, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems. [5] He has been on the faculty of the California Institute of Technology since 1991, and he was named Allan E. Puckett Professor in 2008. [3]

Research

Perona’s research focuses on the computational aspects of vision and learning. He developed the anisotropic diffusion equation, a partial differential equation that reduces noise in images while enhancing region boundaries. He is currently interested in visual recognition and in visual analysis of behavior. [6] [7] [8] Perona and Serge Belongie lead the Visipedia project, which facilitates research on visual knowledge representation, visual search, and human-in-the-loop machine learning systems. [9] [10]

Perona pioneered the study of visual categorization (including the publication of the Caltech 101 dataset) for which he was awarded the Longuet-Higgins Prize in 2013. [11] He is also the recipient of the 2010 Koenderink Prize for Fundamental Contributions in Computer Vision, [12] the 2003 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition best paper award, [13] and a 1996 NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award.

Media coverage

Perona has been quoted or had his research featured in various national media outlets, including the New York Times, [6] [14] [15] Science Friday, [16] The New Yorker, [17] and the Los Angeles Times. [18] In 2003, Perona and Stephen Nowlin organized the NEURO art exhibition, which brought together contemporary artists and scientists to explore neuromorphic engineering. [19]

Related Research Articles

Neuromorphic computing is an approach to computing that is inspired by the structure and function of the human brain. A neuromorphic computer/chip is any device that uses physical artificial neurons to do computations. In recent times, the term neuromorphic has been used to describe analog, digital, mixed-mode analog/digital VLSI, and software systems that implement models of neural systems. The implementation of neuromorphic computing on the hardware level can be realized by oxide-based memristors, spintronic memories, threshold switches, transistors, among others. Training software-based neuromorphic systems of spiking neural networks can be achieved using error backpropagation, e.g., using Python based frameworks such as snnTorch, or using canonical learning rules from the biological learning literature, e.g., using BindsNet.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carver Mead</span> American scientist and engineer

Carver Andress Mead is an American scientist and engineer. He currently holds the position of Gordon and Betty Moore Professor Emeritus of Engineering and Applied Science at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), having taught there for over 40 years.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stephen Grossberg</span> American scientist (born 1939)

Stephen Grossberg is a cognitive scientist, theoretical and computational psychologist, neuroscientist, mathematician, biomedical engineer, and neuromorphic technologist. He is the Wang Professor of Cognitive and Neural Systems and a Professor Emeritus of Mathematics & Statistics, Psychological & Brain Sciences, and Biomedical Engineering at Boston University.

David J. Heeger is an American neuroscientist, psychologist, computer scientist, data scientist, and entrepreneur. He is a professor at New York University, Chief Scientific Officer of Statespace Labs, and Chief Scientific Officer and co-founder of Epistemic AI.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Laurent Itti</span> American computer scientist

Laurent Itti is a computational neuroscientist. He received his MS in image processing from the École Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications de Paris in 1994, and a PhD in computation and neural systems from Caltech in 2000. He is currently an associate professor of computer science, psychology, and neuroscience at the University of Southern California, where he has been since 2000.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Takeo Kanade</span> Japanese computer scientist

Takeo Kanade is a Japanese computer scientist and one of the world's foremost researchers in computer vision. He is U.A. and Helen Whitaker Professor at Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science. He has approximately 300 peer-reviewed academic publications and holds around 20 patents.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Misha Mahowald</span> American computational neuroscientist

Michelle Anne Mahowald was an American computational neuroscientist in the emerging field of neuromorphic engineering. In 1996 she was inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame for her development of the Silicon Eye and other computational systems. She died by suicide at age 33.

Caltech 101 is a data set of digital images created in September 2003 and compiled by Fei-Fei Li, Marco Andreetto, Marc 'Aurelio Ranzato and Pietro Perona at the California Institute of Technology. It is intended to facilitate Computer Vision research and techniques and is most applicable to techniques involving image recognition classification and categorization. Caltech 101 contains a total of 9,146 images, split between 101 distinct object categories and a background category. Provided with the images are a set of annotations describing the outlines of each image, along with a Matlab script for viewing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tomaso Poggio</span> Italian physicist and computational neuroscientist

Tomaso Armando Poggio, is the Eugene McDermott professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, an investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, a member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and director of both the Center for Biological and Computational Learning at MIT and the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines, a multi-institutional collaboration headquartered at the McGovern Institute since 2013.

In image processing and computer vision, anisotropic diffusion, also called Perona–Malik diffusion, is a technique aiming at reducing image noise without removing significant parts of the image content, typically edges, lines or other details that are important for the interpretation of the image. Anisotropic diffusion resembles the process that creates a scale space, where an image generates a parameterized family of successively more and more blurred images based on a diffusion process. Each of the resulting images in this family are given as a convolution between the image and a 2D isotropic Gaussian filter, where the width of the filter increases with the parameter. This diffusion process is a linear and space-invariant transformation of the original image. Anisotropic diffusion is a generalization of this diffusion process: it produces a family of parameterized images, but each resulting image is a combination between the original image and a filter that depends on the local content of the original image. As a consequence, anisotropic diffusion is a non-linear and space-variant transformation of the original image.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jitendra Malik</span> Indian-American academic (born 1960)

Jitendra Malik is an Indian-American academic who is the Arthur J. Chick Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. He is known for his research in computer vision.

Bir Bhanu is the Marlan and Rosemary Bourns Endowed University of California Presidential Chair in Engineering, the Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Cooperative Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Bioengineering, at the Marlan and Rosemary Bourns College of Engineering at the University of California, Riverside (UCR). He is the first Founding Faculty of the Marlan and Rosemary Bourns College of Engineering at UCR and served as the Founding Chair of Electrical Engineering from 1/1991 to 6/1994 and the Founding Director of the Center for Research in Intelligent Systems (CRIS) from 4/1998 to 6/2019. He has been the director of Visualization and Intelligent Systems Laboratory (VISLab) at UCR since 1991. He was the Interim Chair of the Department of Bioengineering at UCR from 7/2014 to 6/2016. Additionally, he has been the Director of the NSF Integrative Graduate Education, Research and Training (IGERT) program in Video Bioinformatics at UC Riverside. Dr. Bhanu has been the principal investigator of various programs for NSF, DARPA, NASA, AFOSR, ONR, ARO and other agencies and industries in the areas of object/target recognition, learning and vision, image/video understanding, image/video databases with applications in security, defense, intelligence, biological and medical imaging and analysis, biometrics, autonomous navigation and industrial machine vision.

Kwabena Adu Boahen is a Ghanaian-born Professor of Bioengineering and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. He previously taught at the University of Pennsylvania.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fei-Fei Li</span> Chinese American computer scientist (born 1976)

Fei-Fei Li is a China-born American computer scientist, known for establishing ImageNet, the dataset that enabled rapid advances in computer vision in the 2010s. She is Sequoia Capital professor of computer science at Stanford University and former board director at Twitter. Li is a co-director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence and a co-director of the Stanford Vision and Learning Lab. She served as the director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 2013 to 2018.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">René Vidal</span> Chilean computer scientist (born 1974)

René Vidal is a Chilean electrical engineer and computer scientist who is known for his research in machine learning, computer vision, medical image computing, robotics, and control theory. He is the Herschel L. Seder Professor of the Johns Hopkins Department of Biomedical Engineering, and the founding director of the Mathematical Institute for Data Science (MINDS).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Serge Belongie</span> Professor of Computer Science

Serge Belongie is a professor of Computer Science at the University of Copenhagen, where he also serves as the head of the Danish Pioneer Centre for Artificial Intelligence. Previously, he was the Andrew H. and Ann R. Tisch Professor of Computer Science at Cornell Tech, where he also served as Associate Dean. He has also been a member of the Visiting Faculty program at Google. He is known for his contributions to the fields of computer vision and machine learning, specifically object recognition and image segmentation, with his scientific research in these areas cited over 150,000 times according to Google Scholar. Along with Jitendra Malik, Belongie proposed the concept of shape context, a widely used feature descriptor in object recognition. He has co-founded several startups in the areas of computer vision and object recognition.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gregory D. Hager</span> American computer scientist

Gregory D. Hager is the Mandell Bellmore Professor of Computer Science and founding director of the Johns Hopkins Malone Center for Engineering in Healthcare at Johns Hopkins University.

Pedro Felipe Felzenszwalb is a computer scientist and professor of the School of Engineering and Department of Computer Science at Brown University.

Jiebo Luo is a Chinese-American computer scientist, the Albert Arendt Hopeman Professor of Engineering and Professor of Computer Science at the University of Rochester. He is interested in artificial intelligence, data science and computer vision.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael J. Black</span> American-born computer scientist

Michael J. Black is an American-born computer scientist working in Tübingen, Germany. He is a founding director at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems where he leads the Perceiving Systems Department in research focused on computer vision, machine learning, and computer graphics. He is also an Honorary Professor at the University of Tübingen.

References

  1. 1 2 Perona, Pietro; Malik, Jitendra (1990). "Scale-space and edge detection using anisotropic diffusion" (PDF). IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. 12 (7): 629–639. doi:10.1109/34.56205. S2CID   14502908.
  2. "Computational Vision: [Home]". vision.caltech.edu.
  3. 1 2 Pietro Perona at the Caltech directory
  4. Pietro Perona at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  5. Pietro Perona at the Simons Foundation
  6. 1 2 Gorman, James (3 February 2014). "To Study Aggression, a Fight Club for Flies". The New York Times.
  7. Buchen, Lizzie (2 December 2009). "Behaviour: Flies on film". Nature. 462 (7273): 562–564. doi:10.1038/462562a. ISSN   0028-0836. PMID   19956235.
  8. Reiser, Michael (June 2009). "The ethomics era?". Nature Methods. 6 (6): 413–414. doi:10.1038/nmeth0609-413. ISSN   1548-7105. PMID   19478800. S2CID   5151763.
  9. "Visipedia".
  10. Belongie, Serge; Perona, Pietro (2016). "Visipedia circa 2015". Pattern Recognition Letters. 72: 15–24. Bibcode:2016PaReL..72...15B. doi:10.1016/j.patrec.2015.11.023.
  11. "Longuet-Higgins Prize". IEEE Computer Society. Archived from the original on 2018-03-16. Retrieved 2017-07-15.
  12. "ECCV 2010, 11th European Conference on Computer Vision - Awards". projects.ics.forth.gr.
  13. "CVPR Best Paper Award". IEEE Computer Society. Archived from the original on 2 January 2014.
  14. Hart, Hugh (2007-03-04). "Mojo - Interactive Sculpture - Christian Moeller". The New York Times.
  15. Ricadela, Aaron (2005-03-10). "New System Enhances Images in Crime Investigation". The New York Times.
  16. Tu, Chau (9 January 2017). "An Algorithm to Identify Every Tree". Science Friday.
  17. Twilley, Nicola (22 August 2014). "Out of Many, One: The Science of Composite Photography". The New Yorker.
  18. Smith, Doug (27 July 2016). "L.A. Wants Caltech and Google to count the city's trees". The Los Angeles Times.
  19. Muchnic, Suzanne (16 February 2006). "Avant science". The Los Angeles Times.