Chellappa to Receive IEEE Signal Processing Medal

Rama Chellappa, a Distinguished University Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is slated to receive the 2020 IEEE Jack S. Kilby Signal Processing Medal, awarded annually to researchers who have made a lasting impact on the field of signal processing.

The award was established in 1995 to honor Jack S. Kilby, whose innovation was a monumental precursor to the development of the signal processor and digital signal processing.

In selecting Chellappa to receive the prestigious medal, the IEEE Board of Directors specifically noted his “contributions to image and video processing, especially applications to face recognition.”

Chellappa will be formally honored with the Kilby Medal in May 2020 at an IEEE awards ceremony in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Chellappa has a permanent appointment in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, where he does much of his research. This includes projects involving signal and image processing, computer vision, pattern recognition, multi-dimension stochastic processes, statistical interference, image analysis, robust and secure biometrics, and artificial intelligence in computer vision.

Chellappa’s research group is involved in many aspects of designing robust image and video-based recognition systems. They have spearheaded a new approach for improving the performance of image and video-based recognition systems by using domain adaptation methods. Their approach has been demonstrated for face and object recognition using dictionaries and manifolds, sensor adaptation, and cross-view action recognition.

To see a video overview of Chellappa’s work in computer vision, facial and gait recognition, and active authentication, go here.

Other notable external awards for Chellappa include being named an International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR) Fellow; American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Fellow; Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Fellow; Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Fellow; and IEEE Fellow.

Chellappa received his doctorate in electrical engineering from Purdue University in 1981.