Date:  Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Time:  6:30 to 8:00 pm
 Location:  UT-Austin

Building CPE 2.208
Austin, TX  78759

Topic:  Face Identification by Computer and by Human: Two sides of the Same Coin, or Not?
Speaker:  Tsuhan Chen, Carnegie Mellon University

Abstract: 
Identifying human faces is an important task for multimedia database retrieval.  It has also attracted much attention in homeland security. 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. This talk introduces some interesting facts in human perception of faces and presents 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.

Speaker Bio:

Tsuhan Chen has been with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, since October 1997, where he is a full Professor. He directs the Advanced Multimedia Processing Laboratory, striving to turn multimedia technologies from science fiction into reality. 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. From August 1993 to October 1997, he worked in the Visual Communications Research Department, AT&T Bell Laboratories, Holmdel, NJ, and later at AT&T Labs-Research, Red Bank, NJ, as a Senior Technical staff member and then a Principle Technical staff member.

Dr. Chen 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, CA, in 1990 and 1993, respectively. He is a Fellow of the IEEE