Faculty

Pietro Perona

Allen E. Puckett Professor of Electrical Engineering

Degrees and Appointments

D.Eng., University of Padua (Italy), 1985; Ph.D., University of California, 1990. Assistant Professor, Caltech, 1991-96; Professor, 1996-2008; Puckett Professor, 2008-. Director, Center for Neuromorphic Systems Engineering, 1999-2004. Executive Officer, 2006-10.

Research Overview

Professor Perona's research focusses on vision: how do we see and how can we build machines that see.

Professor Perona has been mostly active in the area of visual recognition, more specifically visual categorization. He is studying how machines can learn to recognize frogs, cars, faces and trees with minimal human supervision, and how one could make large image collections and even the web searchable by image content.

In collaboration with Professors Anderson and Dickinson, professor Perona is building vision systems and statistical techniques for measuring actions and activities in fruit flies and mice. This enables geneticists and neuroethologists to investigate the relationship between genes, brains and behavior.

Professor Perona is also interested in studying how humans perform visual tasks, such as searching and recognizing image content. One of his recent projects studies how to harness the visual ability of thousands of people on the web for classifying and searching image content.

List of Research Areas

machine vision, visual psychophysics, machine learning, signal processing

Research Centers

Information Science and Technology, Center for the Mathematics of Information

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