Dr. Murase graduated from the Faculty of Engineering, Nagoya University in 1978 and completed his masterfs course at the same university in 1980, whereupon he joined Musashino Electrical Communication Laboratory of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Public Corporation (now NTT). He became a senior research engineer at NTT Basic Research Laboratories in 1992 and an executive manager of the Media Information Laboratory, NTT Communication Science Laboratories in 2001. In 2003, he was appointed a professor at the Graduate School of Informatics, Nagoya University. Currently, he is active as a professor in the Department of Intelligent Systems, Graduate School of Informatics as well as dean of the School of Informatics at the same university.Over the years, Dr. Murase has been engaged in research and education in media informatics and has recorded many research achievements. In particular, he pursued technology for robust and high-speed media recognition and search, and developed a succession of unique technologies, such as the parametric eigenspace method and the active search method. Through these research efforts, he broke new ground in media recognition technology and made tremendous contributions to this field.
The parametric eigenspace method is a unique technology that enables extremely robust and fast object recognition, and is unaffected by photometric conditions. This method provides an innovative concept in that appearances of 3D objects under various photometric conditions are represented as a parametric feature trajectory, which had a significant impact on the world.
The active search method performs partial image search, which determines whether or not an image is sufficiently similar to a part of another image. By using the algebraic nature of histogram features, this method dramatically reduces out computational costs for matching without any approximations. As a result, it can accelerate partial image search by hundreds of times while preserving the same search result, which had a significant impact on all the relevant research fields. Dr. Murase and his colleagues demonstrated that this principle for the acceleration can be applied to not only partial image search but also temporal media, such as sounds and videos. This method, called gtime-series active search,h opened the door to a new research field of fast and robust time-series media search.
Many researches by Dr. Murase, including the ones presented above, have been further developed, mainly by researchers he directly mentored during his time with NTT. Services that have been commercially provided through NTT group companies based on their research results include copyright managements for music played in broadcast programs and piracy media monitoring on the Internet. These services act as a foundation of legal media content distribution.
At Nagoya University, he devotes his energies to education and research for recognition technology that operates robustly even under realistic circumstances such as limited image resolutions and unfavorable photometric conditions. For example, he is interested in recognizing the surroundings and creating a map from videos taken for a long time by vehicle-mounted cameras.
In recognition of those achievements, Dr. Murase has been designated as a fellow by the IEEE, the Information Processing Society of Japan, and the IEICE. He has received a number of awards, including the Medal with Purple Ribbon, Hisoka Maejima Award, Minsterfs Award from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, and an Achievement Award from the IEICE. He has contributed to development of the fields covered by the IEICE by serving as a chair of the Technical Committee on Pattern Recognition and Media Understanding, and a president of the Information and Systems Society.
As shown above, his achievements in the information and communication fields are outstanding. We confidently believe that Dr. Murase deserves to receive the Distinguished Achievement and Contributions Award from the IEICE.
