Prof Apostolos Antonacopoulos
School of Science, Engineering & Environment
Current positions
Professor
Biography
Apostolos Antonacopoulos leads the Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis (PRImA) research Lab https://www.primaresearch.org at the School of Science, Engineering & Environment at the University of Salford, UK where he currently holds the post of Professor of Pattern Recognition. He received his PhD from the University of Manchester, Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST), UK in 1995. From 1995 to 2004 he worked as Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Liverpool where he founded the PRImA Lab. In 2005, he joined the University of Salford as Senior Lecturer and the PRImA Lab was established and strengthened at Salford. In the same year, he received the IAPR/ICDAR Young Investigator Award for "Outstanding service to the ICDAR community and his innovative research in historical document processing applications."
Professor Antonacopoulos has worked and published extensively on various problems in Document Analysis and Understanding (Image Enhancement, Segmentation, Recognition, Performance Evaluation) as well as on other applications of Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis. He has co-edited the first Special Issue (IJDAR) on Historical Document Analysis https://doi.org/10.1007/s10032-007-0045-1 as well as the first book on Web Document Analysis https://doi.org/10.1142/5375 . He has served as a member of the Editorial Boards of the International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition and of the Electronic Letters on Computer Vision and Image Analysis as well as an Associate Editor of Cultural Heritage Digitisation.
He is a former President of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR) and has served in the Executive Committee of the IAPR in a number of posts including 1st and 2nd Vice President and Treasurer. He has also chaired or served as a member of a number of IAPR and other professional committees. He has given a number of invited talks and tutorials and has held engagements as a technical advisor to libraries and archives, among which are the British Library and the Wellcome Library. He has been active in the organisation of international conferences and workshops and is a member of the programme committees of most conferences in his field. He has significant experience in leading and participating in national, European (H2020 and earlier) and industry-sponsored projects. Recent significant project involvement includes the €4M Europeana Newspapers EU-funded project (extraction and recognition of text in newspapers for the European Digital Library), the €1.8 SUCCEED EU-funded support action for the Centre of Competence in Digitisation, the US$734K Early Modern OCR project (EMOP) funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the £250K 1961 Census small area statistics digitisation project funded by the Office of National Statistics (ONS). Currently, he is leading a £750K project funded by ONS to digitise and model the data in the published census reports from 1921, 1931, 1951 and 1961.
In the most recent Research Excellence Framework (REF2021) - the research quality evaluation of UK Universities - the research impact case study he led on "Enabling Digital Transformation through Effective Digitisation" received the maximum rating of "Outstanding" (4*) in terms of both significance and reach.
https://www.primaresearch.org/
Areas of Research
Digitisation, Document Analysis, Digital Transformation, Image Analysis, Character Recognition, Performance Evaluation, Pattern Recognition, Computer Vision, AI, Cultural Heritage, Digital Humanities, Digital Social Sciences, Data Science.
Areas of Supervision
Document Image Analysis and Recognition
Digitisation
Image/Video Information Extraction
Image Processing/Analysis
Pattern Recognition
Professor Antonacopoulos’s portfolio includes teaching in a wide range of both specialist and mainstream modules at undergraduate and postgraduate level. He considers active cross-fertilisation between teaching and research (particularly in specialist modules) crucial to staying at the forefront of the subject matter and to ensuring wider relevance in the real-world. Themes include:
- Document analysis and engineering;
- Pattern recognition and image analysis;
- Information extraction and semantic web;
- Entrepreneurship and business management;
- Group software project work.
Publications
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A new deep wavefront based model for text localization in 3D video
Nandanwar, L., Shivakumara, P., Ramachandra, R., Lu, T., Pal, U., Antonacopoulos, A., & Lu, Y. (2021). A new deep wavefront based model for text localization in 3D video. IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, 32(6), 3375-3389. https://doi.org/10.1109/TCSVT.2021.3110990
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Text line segmentation from struck-out handwritten document images
Shivakumara, P., Jain, T., Pal, U., Surana, N., Antonacopoulos, A., & Lu, T. (2022). Text line segmentation from struck-out handwritten document images. Expert systems with applications, 210, 118266. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2022.118266
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Flexible character accuracy measure for reading-order-independent evaluation
Clausner, C., Pletschacher, S., & Antonacopoulos, A. (2020). Flexible character accuracy measure for reading-order-independent evaluation. Pattern Recognition Letters, 131, 390-397. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patrec.2020.02.003
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Efficient and effective OCR engine training
Clausner, C., Antonacopoulos, A., & Pletschacher, S. (2020). Efficient and effective OCR engine training. International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition, 23(1), 73-78. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10032-019-00347-8