Maria Petrou

Maria Petrou was a Greek born British scientist, born in Thessaloniki on May 17, 1953 and educated in physics at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and in mathematics and astronomy at the University of Cambridge, who specialized in artificial intelligence and machine vision. She held the professorship of image analysis at the University of Surrey from 1998 to 2005 and the chair of signal processing at Imperial College London from 2006 until her death in 2012, while also directing the Informatics and Telematics Institute at Greece's Centre for Research and Technology Hellas from 2009. She developed novel image recognition techniques, including the trace transform used in facial recognition, and methods for robotic texture analysis and three dimensional measurement, and she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the International Association for Pattern Recognition. She died in Thessaloniki on October 15, 2012.