IEEE Seminar Announcement
Title: Robust Biometrics for [Tracking and] Surveillance
Speaker: Harry Wechsler, Ph.D.
Date: Monday, Nov. 30, 2009
Time: 5:00-5:50 PM
Location: ESB G102, WVU Evansdale Campus

Abstract: Challenges related to an expanded biometric processing space that involves less than perfect sensors, missing information, and/or corrupt data are the main subjects of interest in this talk. Robust designs of biometric systems are proposed to address the above challenges using layered categorization, adaptive and pro-active training strategies, and data fusion. Scale space and recognition-by-parts support layered categorization, semi-supervised learning, transduction support adaptive and pro-active strategies, and boosting and non-linear mappings support multi-level and multi-layer data fusion. Predictive quality-based fusion approaches to multimodal and multialgorithm data are introduced. Few results in support of the developed robust biometrics are demonstrated. Lecture concludes with promising venues for future R&D.

Speaker bio: Harry Wechsler received the PhD degree in computer science from the University of California, Irvine, in 1975. Currently, he is a Professor of computer science and Director for the Center of Distributed and Intelligent Computation at George Mason University (GMU). His research in the field of intelligent systems focuses on computational vision, image and signal processing, data mining, machine learning and pattern recognition, with applications for ATR, biometrics/face recognition, intelligent HCI, performance evaluation, temporal data mining, and video processing and surveillance. He has published more than 200 scientific papers, serves on the editorial board for major scientific publications (among them IEEE Trans. on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, IEEE Trans. on Neural Networks, Compute Vision and Image Understanding) and is the author of Computational Vision (Academic Press, 1990). As a leading researcher in face recognition, he organized and directed the NATO Advanced Study Institute (ASI) on “Face Recognition: From Theory to Applications” (Stirling, UK, 1997), whose seminal proceedings were published by Springer (1998). His book on “Reliable Face Recognition Methods,” which breaks new ground in biometrics and applied modern pattern recognition, will be forthcoming from Springer in the summer of 2006. Dr. Wechsler directed at GMU the development of FERET, which has become the standard facial data base for benchmark studies and experimentation. He was elected an IEEE Fellow in 1992 for “contributions to spatial/spectral image representations and neural networks and their theoretical integration and application to human and machine perception.” He was also elected as an IAPR (International Association of Pattern Recognition) Fellow in 1998. He received from the School of Information Technology and Engineering (IT&E) / GMU the Research Excellence Award in 2003. He was granted (together with his former doctoral students) two patents by USPO in 2004 on fractal image compression using quad-Q-learning and feature based classification (for face recognition). A third patent on open set recognition has been filed with USPO in 2004.