Background
Petrou, Maria was born on May 17, 1953 in Thessaloniki, Greece. Daughter of Costantinos and Dionisia (Voziki) Petrou.
Petrou, Maria was born on May 17, 1953 in Thessaloniki, Greece. Daughter of Costantinos and Dionisia (Voziki) Petrou.
Bachelor of Science in Physics, U. Thessaloniki, Greece, 1975; postgraduate, U. Cambridge, United Kingdom, 1977; Doctor of Philosophy in Astronomy, U. Cambridge, United Kingdom, 1981; Master of Arts, U. Oxford, 1985.
She developed a number of novel image recognition techniques, taught at Surrey University and Imperial College London, and was a prolific author of scientific articles She began tutoring children in maths and science at the age of 15. In 1983, Petrou began working as a postdoctoral research assistant at Oxford University"s Department of Theoretical Physics.
As British academia gained a more practical focus in the 1980s, Petrou began to study machine vision and other aspects of robotic intelligence.
In 1988, she started work at Surrey University"s Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, becoming its Professor of Image Analysis in 1998. She later held the Chair of Signal Processing at Imperial College London, and was the Director of the Informatics and Telematics Institute at Greece"s Centre for Research and Technology (CERTH) from 2009 until her death.
During her career, Petrou developed a number of important image recognition techniques, including methods for robotic texture analysis, image comparison and 3D measurement. Most notably, she and Doctor Alexander Kadyrov co-invented the trace transform, a method of image representation that allows for more efficient facial recognition systems
Technologies based on Petrou"s work have had numerous applications in commerce, medicine and environmental imaging.
She was also an amateur cartoonist, and once challenged her colleagues to construct a robot capable of ironing clothes – a challenge that later developed into a European Union-funded robotics project
Fellow: Institution Engineering and Technology (council member since 2004, trustee since 2006), British Machine Vision Association (chairman 1999—2002), Royal Academy Engineering, International Association Pattern Recognition (chairman technical committee 7 for remote sensing 1998—2002, treasurer 2002-2006). Member: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (senior ).
Married Philip Lindsay Palmer, July 4, 1981 (divorced 1996). 1 child Costas Alexander Palmer.