Dr. Vijayan K. Asari

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Old Dominion University

Thursday, November 16, 2006 at 6:30 PM
Aberdeen Barn
5805 Northampton Blvd.
Virginia Beach, VA 23455
757.464.1580

Fast and automatic recognition of faces from video sequences is an important task for security applications. The task is especially difficult since the number, location, size and orientation of human faces may vary from frame to frame. Existing face recognition techniques, which typically require a large set of training images of individual faces for creating a feature database, are not feasible for many applications when these multiple training images in various poses and illuminations are not always available. In fact, the most typical scenario is to be able to robustly recognize faces, even though only one or a very small number of training images are available, and these training images were acquired under significantly different lighting and pose conditions. Motivated by human visual perception, which remains robust despite these difficulties, a feature-based face recognition system, largely independent of pose and lighting, is being developed in the Computational Intelligence and Machine Vision Laboratory at ODU.

Presentation Agenda

• Overview of current face recognition techniques.
• Nonlinear image enhancement technique to transform the images captured in low and non-uniform lighting environment into a uniform lighting condition.
• Skin segmentation to extract the human skin regions in an image
• Face classification module to detect the face regions in the skin segmented image.
• Face recognition by a self-organizing line attractor network.

Biographical Sketch: Dr. Vijayan K. Asari is an Associate Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia. He is the Director of the Computational Intelligence and Machine Vision Laboratory (ODU Vision Lab) in the ECE department. Dr. Asari received the Bachelor's degree in electronics and communication engineering from the University of Kerala, India, the M. Tech and Ph. D degrees in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. Dr. Asari had been working as an Assistant Professor in electronics and communications at TKM College of Engineering, University of Kerala, India. In 1996, he joined the National University of Singapore as a Research Fellow and led the research team for the development of a vision-guided microrobotic endoscopy system. He joined the School of Computer Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore in 1998 and led the computer vision and image processing related research activities in the Center for High Performance Embedded Systems at NTU. Dr. Asari joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at ODU in August 2000. He is the Director of the VLSI Systems Laboratory at ODU. He is also the Director of the Homeland Security Research Group at ODU. Dr. Asari is the principal investigator of two Navy projects – “Pose and Lighting Invariant Face Location and Recognition” sponsored by the Navy Engineering and Logistics Division, and “Multi-Sensor Electro-Optic Image Based Scene Understanding for Navy Security Automation” sponsored by the Office of Naval Research. Dr. Asari is a Senior Member of the IEEE. His areas of research include signal processing, image processing, computer vision, pattern recognition, artificial neural networks, digital computer architectures and VLSI system design.

Reservations: Please forward RSVP to Kurt Clemente [+1 757 676 6004] or send an email to .

Checks: Checks should be made out to IEEE and brought to the meeting.

• 6:00 PM Executive Committee Meeting
• 6:30 PM Social Period
• 7:00 PM Dinner
• 8:00 PM Technical Presentation

Meal Costs

• Members & Guests: $20.00
• Students$10.00
• There is no charge to attend the presentation.