Pattern Recognition Development in Bulgarian Academy of Sciences

The development of Pattern Recognition (PR) theory in Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (BAS) is traced out from 1970. The major part of the activity has been carried out at the Institute of Information and Communication Technologies (IICT). Due to a few administrative transformations IICT is actually a follower of the ex-institutes ITC (Institute of Technical Cybernetics, 1970–1980), ITCR (Institute of Technical Cybernetics and Robotics, 1881–1989, Institute of Information Technologies, 1990–2010) and IICT (Institute of Information and Communication Technologies, 2010–). The research included image and speech processing and recognition. Attention has been paid to the following scientific problems: noise suppression, contrast enhancement contour delineation, object segmentation, feature selection, feature space minimization, methods, algorithms and software for object classification and identification. All this aimed the solution of different practical problems. The obtained theoretical results have been published as 370 papers and conference presentations, mainly international. 11 doctoral theses have been developed [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11], 4 monographs [12, 13, 14, 15], two of which in English, and a Handbook [16] have been written, and an international patent was obtained [17]. These results were connected to 51 projects, 4 of which in the frame of 4th, 5th, 6th and COST European programs. 14 software products have been implemented in the country and 2 abroad. This activity is further described in more detail for each of the predecessors.