Vishal Patel, an associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering who is also a member of the Center for Language and Speech Processing, has received the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR) Young Biometrics Investigator Award (YBIA).

IAPR is an international association of non-profit, scientific, and professional organizations concerned with pattern recognition, computer vision, and image processing. The highly competitive award recognizes an individual under the age of 40 who has made substantial contributions to the IAPR Biometrics community and whose research has had a major impact in biometrics. Patel was selected by the Committee for “advancing learning in biometrics and identity science.”

Biometrics refers to the physiological or behavioral characteristics of an individual which is used for identity verification and person recognition. Patel focuses on biometrics as well as signal and image processing, computer vision, machine learning and medical image analysis. His research has a wide array of applications, including long-range surveillance, user authentication, autonomous navigation, and remote sensing.

Patel, who also received an NSF CAREER Award earlier this year for a project that focuses on developing data-driven learning-based approaches for restoration and understanding of images degraded by atmospheric turbulence, was nominated for the YBIA award by Mark Nixon, the former president of the IEEE Biometrics Council. He was invited to deliver a plenary talk at the 2021 International Joint Conference on Biometrics.

Patel joined Johns Hopkins in 2018 from Rutgers University.