Face Identification by Computer and by Human: Two sides of the Same Coin, or Not?

Speaker:        Prof. Tsuhan Chen
                Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
                Carnegie Mellon University
 
Topic:          Face Identification by Computer and by Human:
                Two sides of the Same Coin, or Not?
 
Date:           Wednesday, 28 July 2004
        
Time:           11:00 am - 12 noon
 
Venue:          Lecture Theatre F
                (Leung Yat Sing Lecture Theatre, near lift nos. 25/26)
                HKUST
 
ABSTRACT:
 
Identifying human faces is an important task for multimedia database 
retrieval.  It has also attracted much attention in homeland security 
recently.  While human perception is fine-tuned to detect and recognize 
face images with great precision, existing face recognition algorithms 
running on most efficient computers perform much worse than humans.  Can 
we learn from human perception to improve the performance of face 
identification by a computer?  Or, is it that such a 
biologically-inspired approach, or biomimetic, is not a good idea at all?  
In this talk we will start by introducing some interesting facts in human 
perception of faces.  We will then present examples of image analysis 
techniques that are inspired by human perception.  Comparing these 
techniques with face recognition algorithms based on conventional pattern 
recognition techniques, we will outline some promising research 
directions.
 
 
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Biography:
 
Tsuhan Chen has been with the Department of Electrical and Computer 
Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, since 
October 1997, where he is currently a Professor. He directs the Advanced 
Multimedia Processing Laboratory  and the "ITRI 
Lab at CMU," a collaborative research laboratory sponsored by Industrial 
Technology Research Institute (ITRI). His research interests include 
multimedia signal processing and communication, implementation of 
multimedia systems, multimodal biometrics, audio-visual interaction, 
pattern recognition, computer vision and computer graphics, 
bioinformatics, and building collaborative virtual environments. From 
August 1993 to October 1997, he worked in the Visual Communications 
Research Department, AT&T Bell Laboratories, Holmdel, New Jersey, and 
later at AT&T Labs-Research, Red Bank, New Jersey, as a senior technical 
staff member and then a principle technical staff member.
 
Tsuhan helped create the Technical Committee on Multimedia Signal 
Processing, as the founding chair, and the Multimedia Signal Processing 
Workshop, both in the IEEE Signal Processing Society. His endeavor later 
evolved into founding of the IEEE Transactions on Multimedia and the IEEE 
International Conference on Multimedia and Expo, both joining the efforts 
of multiple IEEE societies. He is appointed the Editor-in-Chief for IEEE 
Transactions on Multimedia for 2002-2004.
 
Before serving as the Editor-in-Chief for IEEE Transactions on 
Multimedia, Tsuhan also served in the Editorial Board of IEEE Signal 
Processing Magazine and as Associate Editor for IEEE Trans. on Circuits 
and Systems for Video Technology, IEEE Trans. on Image Processing, IEEE 
Trans. on Signal Processing, and IEEE Trans. on Multimedia. He co-edited 
a book titled Advances in Multimedia: Systems, Standards, and Networks 
with focus on the ISO MPEG-4 Standard.
 
Tsuhan received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the 
National Taiwan University in 1987, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in 
electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology, 
Pasadena, California, in 1990 and 1993, respectively. He received the 
Charles Wilts Prize for outstanding independent research in Electrical 
Engineering leading to a Ph.D. degree at the California Institute of 
Technology. He has published more than a hundred of technical papers and 
holds fifteen U.S. patents. He was a recipient of the National Science 
Foundation CAREER Award, titled "Multimodal and Multimedia Signal 
Processing," from 2000 to 2003.