A researcher in Florida State University’s College of Arts and Sciences has received top academic honors for his work to improve the visual-recognition capabilities of computers.

Anuj Srivastava

Professor Anuj Srivastava of the Department of Statistics is the recipient of a grant from the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program, which sends American faculty members, scholars and professionals abroad to lecture and/or conduct research for up to a year. With the Fulbright award, he will collaborate with computer scientists in an ongoing project at the University of Science and Technology in Lille 1 in northern France.

Srivastava works in the area of “computer vision,” an interdisciplinary field in which researchers develop computer algorithms for recognizing objects from their images. The images can originate from anywhere, from YouTube videos and Xbox Kinect data to MRI scans and X-ray crystallography.

At the Lille university, Srivastava and his colleagues previously studied the shapes of three-dimensional facial scans in order to recognize people and their emotions. Their next goal is to exploit cheap gaming sensors, such as Kinect, to help evaluate actions and activities performed by human beings in front of these sensors.

“This framework can be useful, for example, in helping patients learn, correct, and perform physiotherapeutic exercises without ever visiting a clinic,” he said. “The science of understanding complex human behavior and emotional state, using data collected from remote cameras, is very deep and fascinating. While the sensors are advancing at a rapid rate, the tools for analyzing such data lag far behind. Our goal of developing systems that recognize and guide human activities is a step in addressing that issue.”

The Fulbright award isn’t the only honor to come Srivastava’s way in recent months. On April 25, he was named a Distinguished Research Professor during FSU’s annual Faculty Awards Ceremony. The designation was established to recognize outstanding research and/or creative activity of eligible Florida State faculty. Recipients of the honor receive a one-time award of $10,000.

“People who work on research areas going across established boundaries have to be patient in terms of recognitions,” Srivastava said. “Getting these two honors — the Fulbright scholar award and the Distinguished Research Professor Award — is, therefore, deeply satisfying and very humbling.”

Both the Fulbright grant and the Distinguished Research Professor Award are well-deserved honors, said the chairman of FSU’s Department of Statistics, Xufeng Nu.

“Dr. Srivastava is a top researcher and outstanding leader in the field of statistical computation, shape analysis and modeling,” Nu said. “His reputation has attracted more than 10 Ph.D. students to the department. We are very proud of Anuj's achievements, which help to make the graduate program of the statistics department one of the strongest in the nation.”

Computer-vision research is a fast-moving and interdisciplinary field in which collaborative efforts involving people with diverse knowledge are essential, Srivastava said. He cited his long collaboration with Professor Eric Klassen from the FSU Department of Mathematics as “the key behind our success, in developing both novel theory and efficient practical solutions.

“We have also benefited from many excellent graduate students in our group, four of whom have won FSU’s Research and Creativity Award in recent years.”

Srivastava joins a growing list of faculty Fulbright recipients at Florida State. More than 40 have served as Fulbright scholars since 1990.

Sponsored by the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, the Fulbright Scholar Program is an international educational exchange program designed to increase the mutual understanding between citizens of the United Sates and those of more than 155 participating countries. Roughly 1,600 U.S. students, 4,000 foreign students, 1,200 U.S. scholars and 900 visiting scholars receive awards each year, in addition to several hundred teachers and professionals.