Chew Tan

Professor Tan Chew Lim has been elected as a fellow of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR). Since 1994, the IAPR Fellow Award has been biennially conferred on persons to acknowledge their distinguished contributions to the field of pattern recognition and to IAPR activities. This prestigious award is only presented to the top 0.25% of the IAPR membership.

Prof Tan was presented with the award at the 21st International Conference on Pattern Recognition 2012 (ICPR) banquet on 14 November 2012 at Hotel Grand Shinonome in Tsukuba, Japan. The award was presented to Prof Tan in recognition for his contributions to pattern recognition for document analysis.

Document analysis requires pattern recognition techniques to process and extract information from documents from different sources. Prof Tan’s research in document analysis is in document image binarisation. This is usually performed in the pre-processing stage of any image processing application. It converts a gray-scale document image into a binary document image and accordingly facilitates the ensuing tasks such as document skew estimation and document layout analysis. As more and more text documents are scanned, fast and accurate document image binarisation is becoming increasingly important.

Prof Tan also serves as a member of the IAPR Governing Board and was also the Founding President (2004 -2008) and the Vice President (2008 – present) of Pattern Recognition and Machine Intelligence Association (PREMIA) Singapore.