Henry S. Baird

Professional Activities

Dr. Baird played a central role in the 1990s renaissance of basic research in the machine-vision field of document image analysis. He was the principal organizer of a pivotal international workshop in 1990 (SSPR'90) the success of which triggered the founding of the Int'l Assoc. for Pattern Recognition (IAPR) Int'l Conf. on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR), now the principal conference in the field.

He has also initiated several other workshops: with Larry Spitz in 1994 the Document Analysis Systems (DAS) workshop series; with Tapas Kanungo a Multi-lingual OCR workshop in 1999; with Manuel Blum in 2002 the Human Interactive Proofs (HIP) workshop series (HIP2002); and with Venu Govindaraju in 2003 the Document Image Analysis for Libraries (DIAL) workshop series (DIAL2004).  He co-organized, with Prof. Dan Lopresti, the 2nd Int'l Workshop on Human Interactive Proofs (HIP2005) (May 2006).  He has recently served as Chair of the Program Committee for DIAL2006.

He was co-Chair of the Program Committee of ICDAR'97. He was Symposium Chair of the 5th UNLV Symposium on Document Analysis and Information Retrieval (April, 1996), with responsibility for the entire technical program. He was co-Chair of the IS&T/SPIE 1995 Document Recognition II conference.  He served as Workshops Chair for the IAPR ICDAR 2003 Conf. and again for ICDAR'2005 in Korea.  For the DAS series, he has (too) often organized the discussion groups ("break-out working groups'').

In September 2000 he was elected by the Governing Board of the Int'l Assoc. for Pattern Recognition (IAPR) to a two-year term as the Second Vice-President of its Executive Committee. The IAPR then coordinated professional activities of 37 member societies in as many countries representing about 7,000 individual researchers. The IAPR's member society for the US is the IEEE Computer Society. The disciplines embraced by the IAPR include computer vision, image processing, and document image analysis, among many others. The "ExCo"'s Second Vice-President is responsible for liaison with the ICPR, the principal conference of the society, and with the IFIP, among other duties.

He was a founding member of the Editorial Board for the International Journal of Document Analysis and Recognition, serving for a decade (1996-2006).  For IJDAR he co-guest-edited (with Tapas Kanungo and Robert Haralick) a special issue on ``Performance Analysis.'' He served on the Editorial Board of Computer Vision & Image Understanding journal for seven years (1993-2000); for this journal he co-guest-edited (with Junichi Kanai) a Special Issue on ``Document Image Analysis and Retrieval.'' For the Information Retrieval Journal, he co-guest-edited (with Francine Chen) a Special Issue on ``Document Image Retrieval.'' He served as an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence for three years (1989-1991). He has been an Associate Editor of the Pattern Recognition journal for many years (1989-present).

He has served on the program committees of ICDAR (1991, 1993, 1995, 1999, 2001, 2003, 2005, 2007), SSPR Workshops (1990, 1992, and 1994), the IAPR Int'l Conf. on Pattern Recognition (1994, 1998, 2002, 2008), the UNLV Symposia on Document Analysis and Information Retrieval (1992, 1994, 1995), IAPR DAS Workshops (1994, 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2008), and the 1st Workshop on Automatic Identification Advanced Technologies (1997). He served as Area Chair for CVPR'99 for "applications relating to vision and document understanding."

He was a founding member of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Robotics, and served as the editor of its newsletter. He has chaired many technical sessions at conferences and professional meetings.

Software implementations of his model-based image generator, based on his image degradation model, have been made publically available, and data generated by this software has been published in a CD-ROM that has become a standard for the international research community.