Vijayan Asari

Dr. Vijayan K. Asari (Krishnan Asari Vijayan) is a Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering and Ohio Research Scholars Endowed Chair in Wide Area Surveillance at University of Dayton, Dayton, Ohio. He is the director of the University of Dayton Vision Lab (Center of Excellence for Computational Intelligence and Machine Vision). Dr. Asari had been a Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia till January 2010. He was the founding director of the Computational Intelligence and Machine Vision Laboratory (ODU Vision Lab) at ODU.

Dr. Asari received the Bachelor's degree in electronics and communication engineering from the University of Kerala (College of Engineering, Trivandrum), India, in 1978, the M. Tech and Ph. D degrees in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, in 1984 and 1994 respectively. His doctoral dissertation was "Multiple Valued Logic Neural Network Architectures and Algorithms for Prediction, Classification and Recognition of Multi-valued Patterns" under the guidance of Dr. C. Eswaran at IIT Madras.

Dr. Asari had been working as an Assistant Professor in electronics and communications at TKM College of Engineering, University of Kerala, India. In 1996, he joined the National University of Singapore (School of Medicine) as a Research Fellow and led a research team for the development of a vision-guided microrobotic endoscopy system. He joined the School of Computer Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore in 1998 and led the computer vision and image processing related research activities in the Center for High Performance Embedded Systems at NTU.

Dr. Asari joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Old Dominion University as an Associate Professor in August 2000. He was tenured in 2006 and promoted to Full Professor in May 2007. Dr. Asari was chosen to be Ohio Research Scholars Endowed Chair in Wide Area Surveillance at the University of Dayton after an extensive national search and he accepted the position and joined UD in February 2010.

Dr. Asari also holds an advisory position as Vice President of Artificial Intelligence at Deep Lens, Inc., Columbus, Ohio.

Dr. Asari received several awards for teaching, research, advising and technical leadership. He received the University of Dayton School of Engineering Vision Award for Excellence in August 2017. He also received the Outstanding Engineers and Scientists Award for Technical Leadership from The Affiliate Societies Council of Dayton in April 2015 and Sigma Xi George B. Noland Award for Outstanding Research in April 2016. Dr. Asari has been selected as a Fulbright Specialist by the Fulbright Specialist Program of the US Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) and World Learning in August 2017.

Dr. Asari received the Outstanding Teacher Award from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Old Dominion University in April 2002 and the Excellence in Teaching Award from the Frank Batten College of Engineering and Technology in April 2004. He also received the Outstanding Researcher Award from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Excellence in Research Award from the Frank Batten College of Engineering and Technology, both in April 2006. He received the Faculty Advising Award and the Certificate of Excellence for Promoting Undergraduate Research from Old Dominion University, both in 2009.

Dr. Asari has published more than 750 research articles, including an edited book on wide area surveillance and 131 peer-reviewed journal papers, co-authoring with his graduate students and colleagues in the areas of image processing, computer vision, pattern recognition, machine learning, deep learning, neural networks, and high performance digital system architecture design. He has attended more than 200 research meetings/events (conferences, workshops and symposiums) for presenting research that include 23 keynote talks, 99 invited talks and several paper presentations in 30 countries.

Dr. Asari has supervised/mentored 32 PhD dissertations and 48 MS theses in electrical and computer engineering. Currently several Masters and Doctoral level graduate students are working with him. He was awarded five United States patents that include two patents in 2008 with his former graduate students, one patent in 2013 with his former colleagues, and two patents in 2021 and 2022 with his colleague and research collaborators at Air Force Research Laboratory.

Dr. Asari has managed several sponsored research funding as PI or Co-PI mostly received from the US Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), US Army Night Vision and Electronic Sensors Directorate (NVESD), US Army Medical and Materiel Command (USAMRMC), Office of Naval Research (ONR), Naval Medical Research Unit (NAMRU), Navy Engineering and Logistics Office (Technology Support Working Group, TSWG), Combating Terrorism Technology Support Office (CTTSO), National Science Foundation (NSF), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE), Pipeline Research Council International (PRCI) and Pacific Gas and Electric company (PG&E).

Dr. Asari is an elected Fellow and Life Member of SPIE (Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers) and a Senior Member of IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers). He is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS), IEEE Computer Society, IEEE CIS Intelligent Systems Applications Technical Committee, IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society (SMC) Technical Committee of Human Perception in Vision, Graphics and Multimedia, IEEE Internet of Things (IoT) Community, Society for Imaging Science and Technology (IS&T), IS&T Data Analytics and Marketing Task Force, Institute for Systems and Technologies of Information, Control and Communication (INSTICC), and American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE). Dr. Asari is the co-organizer of several SPIE and IEEE conferences and workshops.

Dr. Asari visited the Faculty of Engineering and Water Sciences at the National University of Littoral, Santa Fe, Argentina in November 2017 as a Fulbright Specialist. He visited the John von Neumann Faculty of Informatics at Obuda University, Budapest, Hungary in July 2018 as European Union's Erasmus+ Visiting Faculty. Dr. Asari also visited the School of Computer Science and Engineering at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore as a Visiting Professor in September 2018.

Research interests: Signal processing, image processing, computer vision, pattern recognition, machine learning, deep learning, artificial neural networks, brain-machine interface, and high performance embedded systems.

Dr. Asari's research focuses in the development of algorithms and architectures for automatic object detection, recognition and tracking in wide area surveillance imagery captured by visible, infrared, thermal, multi-spectral, hyperspectral, and LiDAR (light detection and ranging) sensors. His research activities also include 3D scene creation from 2D video streams, 3D scene change detection, automatic visibility improvement of images captured in various weather conditions (low lighting, haze/fog, and rain), human identification by face recognition, human action and activity recognition, and human expression analysis.

One of the recent significant advancements in Dr. Asari's research group is in the development of deep learning based autonomous systems for digital pathology image analysis for abnormal region segmentation by accurate abnormality detection and classification, and prediction of abnormalities for diagnostic purposes. Dr. Asari is also actively involved in brain signal analysis for emotion recognition and brain machine interface using EEG (electroencephalograph) data.