Developing and Applying Biologically-Inspired Vision Systems: Interdisciplinary Concepts

When comparing machine vision systems to the visual systems of humans and animals, there is much to be learned in terms of object segmentation, lighting invariance, and recognition of object categories. Studying the biological systems and applying the findings to the structure of computational vision models and artificial vision systems aims to be an essential approach of advancing the field of machine vision. Developing and Applying Biologically-Inspired Vision Systems: Interdisciplinary Concepts provides interdisciplinary research which evaluates the performance of machine visual models and systems in comparison to biological systems. Blending the ideas of current scientific knowledge and biological vision, this collection of new ideas intends to inspire approaches and cross-disciplinary research to applications in machine vision.

Marc Pomplun is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Boston. In 1998, he received a Ph.D. in Computer Science (Dr. rer. nat.) from Bielefeld University in Germany and the Universitys Best Dissertation in 1998 award. He subsequently conducted research as a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto and as a research scientist at the Centre for Vision Research, York University, Canada. In 2002, he joined the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he founded the Visual Attention Laboratory and initiated the Talks in Cognitive Science (TICS) colloquium series. His research focuses on human vision, particularly visual attention, and how insight into biological vision can be applied to the fields of computer vision and human-computer interaction. In 2007, he received the Outstanding Achievement Award for Scholarship from the College of Science and Mathematics. By the time of his promotion to Professor in 2012, he had made more than 160 contributions to scientific journals and conferences and obtained research funding as a PI and Co-PI from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the US Department of Education.

Junichi Suzuki is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Keio University, Japan, in 2001. He was a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) from 2001 to 2004. Before joining UCI, he was with Object Management Group Japan, Inc., as Technical Director. His research interests include biologically-inspired computing, autonomous adaptive distributed systems, sustainable networking, molecular communication, model-driven software/performance engineering and multiobjective optimization. In these areas, he has authored two books, edited five journal special issues, and published one industrial standard specification and 120+ papers in international journals and conferences. He received nine best paper awards and two best poster awards at major conferences such as IEEE SPECTS 2008 and IEEE SCC 2007. He serves on the editorial boards for six international journals including Elsevier Nano Communication Networks Journal. He has chaired or co-chaired 15 international conferences such as BodyNets 2012, BIONETICS 2010 and ICSOC 2009. He has served on the steering committee of five conferences as well as the program committee of 100+ conferences such as IEEE CEC, ACM GECCO, IEEE ICTAI, IEEE SECON, IEEE AINA, ACM/IEEE BIOSIGNALS and IEEE ICCCN.