Computer Vision & Pattern Recognition Unit (CVPRU)

Prof. (Dr.) Ujjwal Bhattacharya Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Unit of Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India had completed Bachelor of Science (Hons. In Math.) Degree of Calcutta University from Presidency College, Kolkata in 1986. He obtained Master of Science and Master of Philosophy both in Pure Mathematics from Calcutta University in 1989 and 1991 respectively. He did his Post-graduate Diploma in Computer Applications in 1990. He joined the Electronics and Communications Sciences Unit of Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata as a research scholar in 1991. He did his PhD work on handwritten character recognition of Bangla. Before joining in a scientific position of the Statistics and Mathematics Unit of Indian Statistical Institute in 1997, he worked for a short period in a project on "Automatic Map Understanding" in the CVPR Unit of the same Institute. In the year 1999, he joined again the CVPR Unit in a Lecturer equivalent position and he is currently a Professor of the same Unit.

Dr. Bhattacharya is a recipient of National Scholarship (1980, 1982) and ISCA Young Scientist Award (1995). He is a senior member of the IEEE. He is also a life member of the IUPRAI, an Indian Unit affiliated to the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR). The focus of his current research interest is applications of Machine Learning in the areas of Computer Vision, Document Analysis, Online/Offline Handwriting Analysis, etc. Previously, Dr. Bhattacharya worked on the convergence issues of the well-known backpropagation learning algorithm and proposed certain self-adaptive learning rates, which often improves the learning performance of an MLP classifier in various real-life application problems such as texture segmentation, analysis of remote sensing images, recognition of handwritten characters etc. His other research interests include color image analysis, precision agriculture etc.

Dr. Bhattacharya is currently the Principal Investigator of an ongoing Internal Project entitled: "User Adaptive Online Handwriting Recognition". Under his active leadership several large databases of both off-line and on-line handwritten numerals/chracters/words of Indian scripts have recently been developed. Also, a large image database of (i) real-life form documents and (ii) natural scenes containing texts of Bangla, Devanagari and English have been developed. Recently, Dr. Bhattacharya actively participated as a co-investigator in the Resource Center (Bangla) project and Online Handwriting Recognitiion project both sponsored by the Ministry of Information Technology, Govt. of India. Also, he collaborated with the HP Research Lab, India towards benchmarking of on-line handwriting recognition of Indian scripts. Dr. Bhattacharya developed an annotated image database of camera-captured scene images containing texts of Bangla/English/Devanagari scripts with the help of funding by the Royal Society, UK.

Dr. Bhattacharya participated actively in a number of National and International Conferences, Workshops and Summer Schools. Recently, he took a leading role as Organizing Chair in successful organization of the 12th International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition (ICFHR 2010) held in November, 2010 at Kolkata, India.

Dr. Bhattacharya teaches various courses which include Pattern Recognition, Image Processing, Computer Network, Information Technology, File Structure, Discrete Mathematics, Computer Programming in different academic years of curriculams such as M. Tech. in Computer Science, M. S. in Quantitative Economics, M. Stat. etc. of the Indian Statistical Institute.

Till date, Dr. Bhattacharya has visited several Institutes / Research Labs in India and abroad. The list includes: (i) IUCAA, Pune, India, (ii) IBB, GSF, Munich, Germany, (iii) the Laboratory of DNA Information Analysis of Human Genome Center, Institute of Medical Science, University of Tokyo, Japan, (iv) the Department of Computational Science and Engineering, Nagoya University, Japan, (v) Hitachi Central research Laboratory, Kokubunji, Tokyo, Japan, (vi) Computer Science Department, Bristol University, UK, (vii) Department of Computer Science, University of Essex, UK, (viii) delivered a lecture entitled on "Off-line Handwritten Character Recognition of Major Indic scripts -- The State of The Art" at the University of Kent, Canterbury, UK, (ix) delivered a lecture on " Character Recognition of Major Indic scripts" at the Fujitsu Research Lab, Beijing, China, (x) delivered an invited lecture on "Machine Learning" at the A. K. Choudhury School of Information Technology, University of Kolkata.

Dr. Bhattacharya published several articles in International journals and conference proceedings. He received a "Certificate of Special Mention" from Computer Society of India for the paper entitled "Analysis of Writer Idiosyncracies Towards Improved Performance of ISIFormReader" co-authored by B. Shaw, S. K. Parui and presented at EAIT-2006, held at Kolkata and another best paper award ("Amiya K. Pujari Award") for the work "An HMM Based Recognition Scheme for Handwritten Oriya Numerals" co-authored by T. K. Bhowmick, S. K. Parui, B. Shaw and presented at the International Conference on Information Technology (ICIT), 2006 at Bhubaneswar, India. Recently, another two of the research papers co-authored by him had been selected for the Best Paper Awards one in each of the International Conferences NGCT 2017 and SocProS 2017.

Hobbies of Dr. Ujjwal Bhattacharya include teaching Mathematics including Computer Science and providing training on programming in C language. He has supervised the master's thesis of a number of students from various Institutions/Universities/colleges of India.

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