The King-Sun Fu Prize: Professor Fu was instrumental in the founding of IAPR, served as its first president, and is widely recognized for his extensive contributions to the field of pattern recognition.

This biennial prize is given to a living person in the recognition of an outstanding technical contribution to the field of pattern recognition, and consists of a cash amount and a suitably inscribed certificate. The prize is derived from interest income from a special fund set up for this purpose.

Congratulations to Josef Kittler, the 2006 recipient of the K.S. Fu Prize!

The J.K. Aggarwal Prize: Professor Aggarwal is widely recognized for his extensive contributions to the field of pattern recognition and for his participation in IAPR's activities.

The recipient of this prize is a young scientist (under the age of 40 at the date of the deadline for nominations) who has brought a substantial contribution to a field that is relevant to the IAPR community and whose research work has had a major impact on the field. 

Congratulations to Bernard Scholköpf, the first recipient of the J.K. Aggarwal Prize!

IAPR Fellows: The IAPR fellowship is conferred on persons in recognition of their outstanding contributions to IAPR and to the field of pattern recognition.

The prestigious IAPR Fellow award was introduced in 1994 to acknowledge distinguished contributions of IAPR members to the field of pattern recognition and to IAPR activities.

According to the Constitution and Bylaws of IAPR, the number of fellows elected biennially must not exceed 0.25% of the total IAPR membership. Both service to IAPR and scientific contributions to the field of pattern recognition are taken into account in the election procedure.

Congratulations to the 2006 IAPR Fellows: 

Eduardo José Bayro Corrochano—“For contributions to geometric computing for perception action systems”

Zen Chen—“For contributions to computer vision and related applications, and for service to IAPR”

Rita Cucchiara—“ For contributions to pattern recognition for video-surveillance”

Xiaoqing Ding—“ For contributions to OCR, face recognition, biometric technology and document image analysis”

Patrick J. Flynn—“ For contributions to research in three-dimensional object recognition systems and biometrics”

Xiaoyi Jiang—“ For contributions to range image analysis and structural pattern recognition, and for service to
IAPR”

Ching-Chung Li—“ For contributions to biomedical pattern recognition and multiresolution image processing”

Vittorio Murino—“ For contributions to the design of probabilistic (graphical) methods for pattern recognition”

B. John Oommen—“For contributions to fundamental and applied problems in syntactic and statistical pattern
recognition”

Petra Perner—“For contributions to image interpretation by developing methods for case-based reasoning,
machine learning and data mining, and for service to IAPR”

Katsuhiko Sakaue—“For contributions to computer vision and its applications”

Mubarak Shah—“ For contributions to motion-based recognition and shape from shading in computer vision”

Tieniu Tan—“ For contributions to computer vision and pattern recognition”

B.V.K. Vijaya Kumar—“ For contributions to frequency domain pattern recognition methods”

David Zhang—“ For contributions to biometrics technologies and systems”

The Piero Zamperoni Best Student Paper Award: Dr. Piero Zamperoni was an outstanding educator in pattern recognition.

The IAPR Education Committee presents this award to  acknowledge and encourage excellence in pattern recognition research by students, and to help assure the future livelihood of the field.

Congratulations to Fan Zhang and Edwin R. Hancock whose paper “A Riemannian Weighted Filter for Edge-sensitive Image Smoothing” won this award at ICPR2006.

The Best Industry-Related Paper Award: This award acknowledges the best paper by authors in industry as voted by the IAPR Industrial Liaison Committee.

Congratulations to Junji Sato, Tomokazu Takahashi, Ichiro Ide and Hiroshi Murase whose paper titled “Change Detection in Streetscapes from GPS Coordinated Omni-Directional Image Sequences” won this award.

The Best Track Paper Award (ICPR2006 Only):  This year, for the 18th International Conference on Pattern Recognition, IBM sponsored a best paper per track award. 

Congratulations to the following authors:

Track

Best Student Paper

Best Paper

1

Computer Vision and Image Analysis

Title: Segmentation and Probabilistic Registration of Articulated Body Models

Authors: Aravind Sundaresan and Rama Chellappa

Title: Human Tracking by Particle Filtering Using Full 3D Model of Both Target and Environment

Authors: Tatsuya Osawa, Xiaojun Wu, Kaoru Wakabayashi and Takayuki Yasuno

2

Pattern Recognition and Basic Technologies

Title: Utilizing Information Theoretic Diversity for SVM Active Learning

Authors: Charlie K. Dagli, Shyamsundar Rajaram and Thomas S. Huang

Title: Learning Pairwise Similarity for Data Clustering

Authors: Ana Fred and Anil Jain

3

Signal, Speech and Image Processing

Title: Audio Segmentation and Speaker Localization in Meeting Videos

Authors: Himanshu Vajaria, Tanmoy Islam, Sudeep Sarkar, Ravi Sankar and Ranga Kasturi

Title: Tone Mapping for HDR Image using Optimization - A New Closed Form Solution

Authors: Guoping Qiu, Jian Guan, Jian Duan and Min Chen

4

Systems, Robotics and Applications

Title: Comparative Analysis of Decision-Level Fusion Algorithms for 3D Face Recognition

Authors: Berk Gokberk and Lale Akarun

Title: Unsupervised Decomposition of Mixed Pixels Using the Maximum Entropy Principle

Authors: Lidan Miao, Hairong Qi and Harold Szu

5

Cognitive Approaches & Soft Computing

Title: Continuous Gesture Recognition Using a Sparse Bayesian Classifier

Authors: Shu-Fai Wong and Roberto Cipolla

Title: Analyzing Facial Expressions Using Intensity-Variant 3D Data for Human Computer Interaction

Authors: Lijun Yin, Xiaozhou Wei, Peter Longo and Abhinesh Bhuvanesh