Pietro Perona | |
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Nationality |
Italian American |
Fields | Computer Science |
Institutions | California Institute of Technology |
Alma mater |
University of Padua University of California, Berkeley (1990, PhD) |
Doctoral advisor | Jitendra Malik |
Doctoral students | Stefano Soatto, Fei-Fei Li, Silvio Savarese, Domitilla Del Vecchio |
Known for | Computer vision |
Pietro Perona is Allan E. Puckett Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computation and Neural Systems at the California Institute of Technology. He is known for research on computer vision.
Perona received the D.Eng. degree from the University of Padua in 1985. He completed the PhD at the University of California of Berkeley in 1990. His dissertation was titled Finding Texture and Brightness Boundaries in Images, and his adviser was Jitendra Malik. In 1990, he was postdoctoral fellow at the International Computer Science Institute at Berkeley. From 1990 to 1991, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems. He has been on the faculty of the California Institute of Technology since 1991, and he was named Allan E. Puckett Professor in 2008.
Perona’s research focuses on the computational aspects of vision and learning. He is known for the anisotropic diffusion equation, a partial differential equation that filters image noise while enhancing region boundaries. He is currently interested in visual recognition and in visual analysis of behavior. In the early 2000s, Perona pioneered the study of visual categorization for which he was awarded the Longuet-Higgins Prize , including the publication of the Caltech 101 dataset. Currently, in collaboration with colleagues Michael Dickinson and David Anderson, he applies machine vision to measuring and analyzing the behavior of laboratory animals.
In 2003 Perona, together with Stephen Nowlin, was the organizer of the Neuro Art Exhibition bringing together contemporary artists and scientists to explore neuromorphic engineering.
Perona is the recipient of the 2013 Longuet-Higgins Prize and of the 2010 Koenderink Prize for fundamental contributions in computer vision. He is the recipient of the 2003 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers–Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition best paper award. He is also the recipient of a 1996 NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award.