Brief CV of J.M.H. (Hans) du Buf

Updated May 2011

Personal

• Born March 29, 1951, in Venlo (The Netherlands). Married 3rd of August 1972. Adopted two Colombian children in 1985. Moved to Renens near Lausanne, Switzerland, March 1987. Moved to Faro, Portugal, March 1994.
• Still of Dutch nationality.
• Hobbies: long walks, cooking, noncommercial movies, some literature, modern music, collecting antique microscope slides and, last but not least, a structural lack of time to do all this.

Professional

• Graduated from the Technical Highschool (HTS Venlo), Electrical Engineering, in 1973. The final year project was done at the University of Nijmegen, Laboratory of General Physiology (ECG analysis).
• Graduated from the Eindhoven University of Technology, Electrical Engineering, in 1981. This study was interrupted one year by military service. Major courses were on stochastic system theory, signal processing, Fourier optics and medical engineering.
  Student projects were on FIR linear-phase filter design and implementation, performed at the Physiological Psychology Group of Tilburg University, and noncoherent Fourier-optical filter synthesis by means of autocorrelation functions, performed at the Theoretical Electrical Engineering Group of the Eindhoven University of Technology.
  The Master's subject was on digital image processing of ultrasound B-scan images. This work included the development of a generally applicable software package for image handling, as well as image enhancement techniques, inverse filtering to improve the lateral beam resolution, and statistical texture analysis. This work was performed at the Biophysical Laboratory of the Ophtalmological Department, University of Nijmegen Hospital.
• From 1982 to 1986 engaged by the Dutch Organisation for the Advancement of Pure Research, Foundation for Biophysics, to investigate the nonlinear spatial transfer characteristics of the human visual system. This psychophysical work was done at the Institute for Perception Research, which was a collaboration between the Eindhoven University of Technology and the Philips Physics Laboratory, and fully dedicated to perception research, which resulted in a PhD obtained in 1987. Main issues were the measurement of spatial detection thresholds and suprathreshold curves of iso-brightness and apparent iso-contrast, as well as the modeling of threshold and suprathreshold spatial vision by means of nonlinear multichannel models.
• From 1987 to 1994 engaged by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPF-Lausanne), Signal Processing Laboratory, to do research on unsupervised texture segmentation. This work bears heavily on the image representation in the primary visual cortex, and concentrates on the use and modeling of the local Gabor power spectrum. An innovative aspect was the use of the Gabor phase spectrum for the discrimination of highly structured textures, which requires 2D phase unwrapping. More recent work involved the study of complex moments of the Gabor power spectrum for the detection of structures with N-folded symmetries.
• In March 1994 engaged as Invited Associate Professor at the Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science, Faculty of Sciences and Technology, University of Algarve (Faro, Portugal). Since February 2005 he is a normal Associate Professor at UAlg. Teaching concerns digital systems and computer architecture at the BSc level, and computer graphics and image processing at MSc level.
• At the moment, his UALG Vision Laboratory counts 2 postdocs, 5 PhD students, 6 MSc students and 1 undergrad student, who are all working on different aspects of image processing, computer graphics, parallel computing, vision modelling and now also cognitive robotics. All equipment of the lab has been acquired by means of project funding.

Funded projects etc.

• Current work, which already started while still being at the EPFL, concentrates on the detection and discrimination of different types of lines and edges by combining the Gabor power and phase spectrum. Problems under study are ambiguous neighbourhoods where different lines/edges cross or are very close, the detection and discrimination of structures like vertices (keypoints) with a high accuracy and certainty, visual reconstruction, and the modeling of psychophysical data sets concerning brightness perception as well as visual illusions. The goal is to obtain a complete syntactical image representation which combines local and global (area) attributes, employing a multiscale data-driven approach. In ongoing work the multiscale line, edge and keypoint representations are used for developing cortical models for global and local gist vision, overt and covert attention, invariant object categorisation and recognition, optical flow and disparity, and 3D face recognition. The models are being implemented on mobile robot platforms with a stereo camera and two microphones (for binaural source localisation), in the context of cognitive robotics: from high-level task scheduling to low-level automatic sequencing of atomic visuomotor actions.
• His first project was funded by the Fonds national suisse de la recherche scientifique; grant No. 21-33641.92. Title: High definition image analysis and synthesis; start Oct 1992, duration 2 years plus 2 years prolongation; budget SFR 175,600.
• Prof. du Buf was a partner in the European PAMONOP research network, in the context of the EC Human Capital and Mobility programme. The central theme was Modeling neural operators for pattern recognition. (1994 to 1996, local budget 36,000 euros)
• Prof. du Buf was a partner in the MAST3 project ISACS (Integrated System for the Analysis and Characterization of the Seafloor). Start: March 1996; duration 3.5 years; local budget 250,000 euros. The task was to develop efficient 3D interpolation and segmentation algorithms for underwater acoustic data, together with the development of new, interactive, 3D scientific visualization methods. A common element in the interpolation, segmentation and surface rendering is the use of quad- and octrees.
• Prof. du Buf had, together with Prof. Todd Reed from the Univ. California at Davis, a NATO Collaborative Research Grant CRG 971584: The analysis of acoustic data via 3-D segmentation.
• Prof. du Buf was a partner in the Portuguese-funded project SETNA-ParComp, which aimed at developing scalable algorithms for computer vision on MPP systems (i.e. Parsytec CC and Beowulf clusters). Local budget about 3.8 Mescudo for 3 years. Start: August 1997.
• Prof. du Buf was the Coordinator of the MAST3 project ADIAC (Automatic Diatom Identification and Classification). Start May 1998, duration 3 years; 7 European partners; total budget 1,254,000 euros; local budget 200,000 euros. The final scientific report of the project was published as a book.
• Prof. du Buf was a partner in the INCO-DC project AMOVIP (Advanced Modeling of Visual Information Processing). This project aimed at developing methods for pattern recognition in relation to human vision with collaborations between Spain, Portugal, Mexico, and Brazil. Start March 1998, duration 3.5 years, local budget 110,000 euros.
• Funded Portuguese project MOVIDE (Modeling Visual Detection), FCT/MCT (Lisbon), POCTI/36445/PSI/2000, start October 2000, duration 3 years, budget 70,000 euros. Goal: to develop 2D detection models that can explain many different data sets, including Modelfest data and Contrast Interrelation Functions.
• In collaboration with Joao Paulo Costeira (ISR Lisbon): funded Portuguese project 3D Modeling from Video, FCT/MCT (Lisbon), ...code..., start 2001, duration 3 years, budget 70,000 euros. Goal: to develop 3D scene construction and sequence coding.
• Prof. du Buf was a partner of the STREP EXOCET/D (Extreme ecosystem studies in the deep ocean: Technological developments). Start 2004, duration 3 years, 13 partners. Total budget 2 Meuro, local budget 101 Keuro. UALG's task was to construct 3D terrain maps from acoustic data and to study the classification of vegetation.
• Prof. du Buf was coordinator of the FCT project SmartVision, which aims at developing a visual aid for the blind with global navigation (GPS and GIS at UTAD Campus) and local navigation (walkable path and obstacle negotiation). Start Jan. 2008, duration 3.5 years, total budget 160 Keuro.
• Prof. du Buf is coordinator of the new FCT project Blavigator, which is a follow-up of SmartVision for developing a real prototype system using cheap off-the-shelf components. Start June 2011, duration 2 years, total budget 70 Keuro.
• Prof. du Buf participates in the EU-FP7-funded project NeuralDynamics, coordinated by Prof. Gregor Schoener at the Institut fuer Neuroinformatik, Ruhr Univ. Bochum (Germany). The project counting four partners, our role is to develop cortical models for object and scene representations guided by attention. Start April 2011, duration 4 years, total budget 3 Meuro.

Memberships and other activities:

• Associate editor of the International Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence
• Member of IEEE Computer Society
• Member of the Portuguese Association for Pattern Recognition (APRP)
• Integrated in the Institute for Systems and Robotics (ISR) at the Tecnico in Lisbon
• Presented invited lectures at:
  1 Neurologisches Institut, University of Freiburg (Prof. Spillmann)
  2 Laboratory for Image Analysis University of Aalborg (Prof. Granum)
  3 Psychologisches Institut III der Westfaelischen Wilhelms-Universitaet Muenster (Prof. Mortensen)
  4 Institut fuer Neuroinformatik, Lehrstuhl fuer Theoretische Biologie der Ruhr-Universitaet Bochum (Profs von Seelen and von der Marlsburg)
  5 Institut fuer Arbeitsphysiologie an der Universitaet Dortmund (Prof. Cavonius, Dr Ehrenstein)
  6 Institut fuer Physiologische Psychologie, Lehrstuhl II: Experimentelle und klinische Neuropsychologie an der Heinrich-Heine Universitaet Duesseldorf (Prof. Wist, Dr Schrauf)
  At McGill University in Montreal:
  7 Vision Research Centre at the Dept of Ophthalmology (Profs Hess, Kingdom, Baker, Mullen)
  8 Computer Vision and Robotics Laboratory (Prof. Zucker)
  9 Institute for Medical Psychology, University of Muenchen (Prof. Rentschler, Dr. Zetzsche)
• Regularly reviewing papers for journals like Signal Processing (and the EUSIPCO conference), IEEE-PAMI, IEEE Computer Vision, IEEE Image Processing, IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Pattern Recognition (Letters), the Int. J. of Pattern Recogn. and Artif. Intell. (IJPRAI), Biological Cybernetics, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, IEE Proceedings on Vision, Image and Signal Processing, IEE Electronics Letters, etc.
• Publications: Prof. du Buf is (co)author of 33 journal papers and 90 conference papers. See the complete and updated PUBLICATION LIST

Contact: dubuf@ualg.pt

Go back to the Hans du Buf homepage or visit the UAlg Vision Laboratory.

Last update: May 2011 - HdB