Luc Vincent
**** ******* ****** 650-***-****. Day: 650-***-****
Palo Alto, CA 94306 ***@*******-***.***
USA www.vincent-net.com/luc
SUMMARY
Over 20 years experience in applied computer vision R&D, software development, and R&D management. Internationally rec-
ognized expert in image processing & analysis, document analysis & recognition, and OCR. Equally effective in startups, large
business groups, commercial research labs, or as independent consultant. Strong leadership skills, with substantial experience
managing large and distributed technical/operations teams, and coordination of complex programs across business groups.
EDUCATION
Ph.D. in Morphological Image Processing, Ecole Nationale Sup rieure des Mines de Paris, France, 1990
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Masters ( Dipl me d Etudes Avanc es ) in Computer Science, Paris XI University, France, 1987
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B.S. ( Dipl me d Ing nieur ), Majoring in Mathematics and Computer Science, Ecole Polytechnique, France, 1986
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PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE
Google, Inc. 2004 present
Director, Engineering
Head of several large geo-related projects, including Google Maps Street View, unveiled in May 2007. Responsible for various
engineering aspects of Google Book Search. Head of Google OCR-related initiatives. Founder and manager of several new
engineering efforts.
LizardTech, Inc. 2000 2004
LizardTech is an imaging software company focusing on the compression and ef cient delivery of complex content over com-
puter networks. In 2000, the company acquired the DjVu (pronounced D j` -Vu ) document compression and delivery tech-
ea
nology from AT&T Labs. DjVu is a le format, a set of advanced document image compression algorithms, and a technology
platform for distributing color documents, whether scanned or electronically produced. LizardTech is commercializing and
further developing this outstanding technology, targeting it to become the de facto standard for document delivery over the
Internet.
Vice President, Document Imaging (2003 2004)
Responsible for all aspects of the LizardTech document imaging product line, including, marketing, strategy, product manage-
ment, alliances, etc.
Overhaul document imaging strategy following Company s acquisition by Celartem Technology.
Instrumental in revamping Lizardtech s marketing activities in the area of document imaging: web site, newsletters,
interviews, press releases, collateral, webinars, trade shows, etc.
Start aggressive product development effort to support new strategy with key features and product improvements. Deeply
involved in the design and implementation of new watermarking and document rights management (DRM) capabilities.
Negotiate alliances with a large number of scanner vendors, imaging companies, content management providers and
various technology partners, in a bid to enhance the company s distribution channels and to increase end-users exposure
to the DjVu technology.
Chief Scientist, Document Imaging (2001 2003)
Share time evenly between technical activities, product development and business development, all centered around DjVu.
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Chief company-wide technical resource on DjVu and more broadly, on document imaging.
Deeply involved in the design and implementation of new products for conversion of electronic documents to DjVu,
speci cally a Virtual Printer Driver for Windows, and a command-line PDF-to-DjVu converter.
Worked closely with product management team on all aspects of document imaging product line: feature sets, user
interface, supported platforms, competitive analysis, schedule, pricing, licensing, documentation, packaging, distribution,
etc.
Relentlessly evangelized DjVu via conference presentations, publications, and the creation of compelling DjVu content.
Identi ed, negotiated and assisted in closing strategic deals involving the DjVu technology. Instrumental in closing at
least four major deals.
Director of Applied Research, Document Imaging (2000 2001)
Led DjVu Applied Research team while remaining an active individual contributor. Along with senior staff, helped re ne
company strategy in the area of document imaging and played proactive role in business development.
Championed and undertook major R&D initiatives, in particular: new set of algorithms, programs and services enabling
the effective creation of DjVu from electronic sources; development of set of document image preprocessing algorithms
such as automatic cropping, deskewing, speckle removal, etc.
Through publications, conference presentations, and invited lectures, helped promote DjVu and identify strategic partners
for LizardTech. Increasingly involved in business development.
Main point of contact for AT&T research team in their frequent interactions with LizardTech.
Strong advocate for LizardTech s continued involvement in open-source activities.
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), Advanced Systems Development Laboratory 1999 2000
The Adanced Systems Development Lab (ASD) is the newest lab at PARC. Its mission is twofold: help Xerox realize the value
of PARC research through effective technology transfer; bring business group needs and perspective back to PARC.
Manager, Imaging Components & Services
Led a team of 8 researchers and developers. Supported ASD s mission in the area of imaging through development of rock-solid
sofware components. Collaborated with other PARC teams and coordinated efforts with Xerox business groups.
Supervised development of a DataGlyph encoding/decoding toolkit and its deployment in a range of Xerox solutions.
DataGlyphs are a compelling alternative to 2D barcodes, providing higher data density and improved reliability in an
aesthetically pleasing manner. Improved accuracy of decoding degraded DataGlyph images by two orders of magnitude.
Managed development and productization of a technology known internally as DigiPaper. Core of technology is a
document representation method based on multi-layer decomposition/segmentation and token-based compression. It
provides visually lossless representation, with compression ratios far in excess of what standard methods can achieve,
and very fast decompression/rendering. Released DigiPaper 1.0 in May 2000, for use in web-based legal document
repository.
Evangelized value of DigiPaper to Xerox business groups. Led efforts to promote technology as the foundation for Xerox
next generation products in the area of scanning, document repositories, and mid-range color printing.
Coordinated image processing development activities across several geographically distributed R&D teams.
Helped identify new business development opportunities and negotiated new strategic alliances for Xerox.
Promoted adhesion to set of strict guidelines for improving the software process (Capability Maturity Model).
ScanSoft, Inc. 1991 1999
ScanSoft is a Xerox subsidiary with a complex history: founded in the 80s by Ray Kurzweil to make reading machines for
the blind, it was acquired by Xerox a few years later, progressively shifted its focus to scanning software, and eventually went
public in early 1999 through a reverse merger with Visioneer. From 1990 to 1999, it was known as Xerox Imaging Systems
(XIS), and for three of these years, it was folded into a large Xerox group called the Software Solutions Division (SSD).
Director, Advanced Development, ScanSoft (Palo Alto, CA, 1997 1999)
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Led focused engineering team responsible for advanced image processing development, in support for ScanSoft s entire
product line. In particular, team developed large parts of the core software used by Pagis Pro, a scanning software
package that received a number of prestigious awards and became the best selling scanning suite on the market.
Managed development of software components for segmentation, adaptive thresholding, and smart compression of
scanned document pages; automatic cropping, noise cleaning, deskewing, and enhancement of document images; im-
age indexing and retrieval; superresolution and image stitching, enabling the production of high quality images from
inexpensive digital cameras.
Promoted and supervised the writing of half a dozen invention proposals and patent applications.
Put in place a number of methods for assuring that developed code adheres to the highest standards and meets prod-
uct team needs (version control, requirement discussions, automatic builds and regression tests on various platforms,
automatic documentation extraction, etc.).
Kept close ties with Xerox PARC and other research organizations to guarantee steady ow of new ideas to ScanSoft.
Participated in business strategy discussions at ScanSoft s senior staff level.
Director, Software Development, Xerox Software Solutions Division (Palo Alto, CA, 1996 1997)
Managed Image Processing Core Technology Group, a team delivering cutting-edge document image analysis software
to a diverse base of internal customers (software and hardware product teams). Supervised releases of about a million
lines of C code, on ve different platforms (Windows NT, Windows 3.1, Macintosh, SunOS, Solaris).
Responsible for handling SSD s relationship with Xerox research groups, including PARC and the European Research
Center (XRCE). Managed a $4M budget for contracting speci c technology pieces with these research groups. Facilitated
technology transfer from Xerox research into SSD, and coordinated efforts to supply PARC and XRCE with speci c
research directions.
Manager, Image Processing and Analysis, Xerox Imaging Systems (Peabody, MA, 1995 1996)
Led team of three engineers (including 2 contractors). Provided technical guidance and led development of document
image analysis algorithms, primarily aimed at TextBridge OCR product.
Initiated a number of government proposals, and was awarded a $0.5M contract by National Security Agency. Project
involved the development of new methods for automatically benchmarking page segmentation algorithms, a topic of great
interest to Xerox, but that could not have been considered without external funding. Served as principal investigator for
this contract for over two years: responsible for technical leadership, hiring and supervising of contractors, management
of schedules, writing of reports, interaction with the customer, and presention the work at technical meetings.
Member of Technical Staff, Xerox Imaging Systems (Peabody, MA, 1991 1995)
Designed and implemented the document page segmentation system that was included in a range of products, from shrink-
wrap software packages (e.g., TextBridge) to reading machines for the blind (The Reading Edge). System is capable of
robustly segmenting pages with complex layouts, and was rated most accurate segmentation package on the market at
the 1995 UNLV OCR accuracy contest (University of Nevada in Las Vegas studies are a reference in the Document
Recognition world).
Major contributor to several other pieces of XIS document recognition technology, including character recognition, page
ltering, binarization techniques, algorithmic and architectural advances.
Harvard University, Robotics Laboratory 1990 1991
Postdoctoral Fellow
Published and extended the morphological algorithmic techniques developed during my PhD work.
Initiated collaborative work with some of the best researchers in the eld.
Participated in the design of an image analysis software for the Macintosh, DIP Station, distributed by the Hayden Image
Processing Group.
Collaborated with Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences on segmentation, quanti cation, and modeling
of corneal endothelial tissue. Designed new technique for the direct estimation of corneal healthiness via image analysis.
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Ecole Nationale Sup rieure des Mines de Paris, France
e 1988 1990
Associate Research Fellow
Worked towards my PhD degree, under the guidance of Prof. Serra.
Undertook new marketing efforts on behalf of the Center for Mathematical Morphology; they led to contracts with
two major French institutions (the A rospatiale Company and the French Institute for Petrol), which I supervised from
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beginning to end.
CONSULTING EXPERIENCE
Independent image analysis consultant since 1988. Clients in a wide range of elds, including medical imaging, remote
sensing, automated inspection, optometry, oil exploration, etc. Some key customers and projects include:
Atlantic Aerospace Electronics Corporation, Waltham MA (1991 93). Developed new algorithms for automatically
extracting correlogram tracks in sonar imagery. Algorithms are capable of detecting tracks even under extremely low
signal-to-noise ratios, where other techniques would fail. Also designed hierarchical watershed-based algorithms to
robustly extract and recognize targets in Forward-Looking Infrared (FLIR) imagery.
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Woods Hole, MA (1992 99). Participated in the design of a system to au-
tomate the detection and classi cation of plankton from towed video microscopy sequences. Provided some of the key
segmentation and feature extraction algorithms used by the system.
Vysis, Inc., Downers Grove, IL (1992 96). Developed complex segmentation and pattern recognition algorithms aimed
at chromosome analysis from blood sample.
Chevron Petroleum Technology Company, La Habra, CA (1996 present). Proprietary project involving oil exploration
and requiring the processing of huge 3D data sets.
Humphrey Systems, Dublin, CA (1998-1999). Developed key image enhancement and feature extraction algorithms for
ophthalmologic instruments.
Applied Imaging, Santa Clara, CA (1999). Designed novel methods for discriminating between different classes of cells
in microscopy slides.
RESEARCH ACTIVITIES
Recognized expert in the eld of Computer Vision. Author of over 60 technical publications on various aspects of
vision, morphological image processing and document understanding. While working in industry, remained active in the
image analysis community and frequently collaborated with some of the world s leading researchers in the eld.
Note: publications are available online at www.vincent-net.com/luc-papers/
Associate editor, of the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI), 2000 2004, and of
the Journal of Electronic Imaging, 1994-2002.
General chair for a number of conferences, including: new SPIE conference on Document Recognition, held yearly in
San Jose, CA, since February 1994; IEEE Document Image Analysis Workshop, held in San Juan, June 1997; upcoming
International Symposium on Mathematical Morphology, Palo Alto, June 2000. Also chair and co-organizer of over a
dozen other conferences since 1991.
In spare time, writing a book entitled Morphology: a Practical and Algorithmic Handbook for Image Analysis, to be
published by Cambridge University Press.
Reviewer for numerous journals and publishers since 1988, including IEEE Trans. on Pattern Analysis and Machine
Intelligence, Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation, Signal Processing, IEEE Trans. on Acoustics,
Speech and Signal Processing, IEEE Trans. on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, IEEE Trans. on Medical Imaging, IEEE
Trans. on Image Processing, Acta Stereologica, Journal of Mathematical Imaging, Journal of Electronic Imaging, Oxford
University Press.
Invited as committee member for a number of Ph.D. dissertations in the eld of Computer Vision.
Invited researcher and lecturer at some of the world s most prestigious institutions, such as: France: INRIA, Thom-
son s Central Research Laboratory, Philips Electronics Laboratory, A rospatiale, GE Medical Systems. The Netherlands:
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CWI, TNO Institute for Perception. United States: Bell Laboratories, Environmental Research Institute of Michigan
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(ERIM), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Brown University, The John Hopkins University, Georgia Institute of Technol-
ogy, Siemens Corporate Research. Australia: Commonwealth Scienti c and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO).
Brazil: INPE (National Institute for Spatial Research) and several Universities in Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Curitiba.
South Africa: University of Witwatersrand, DeBeers.
Extensive teaching experience: dozens of short courses taught in at least eight different countries since 1987.
Patents:
U.S. patent # 7266250 Methods for Generating Anti-Aliased Text and Line Graphics in Compressed Document
Images, issued September 4, 2007 (co-inventors: D. Bloomberg and others)
U.S. patent # 7069149 process for Interpreting Faults from a Fault-Enhanced 2-Dimensional Seismic Attribute
Volume, issued June 27, 2006 (co-inventors: D. Goff, K. Deal, W. Kowalik, S. Bombarde, S. Lee. W. Voltz and R.
Jones)
U.S. patent # 5778092 Method and apparatus for compressing color or gray scale documents, issued July 7, 1998
(co-inventors: P. Macleod and X. Zhu).
Over a dozen additional patents pending.
MISCELLANEOUS
U.S. and French citizenships.
Computer languages and environments: C, C++, JavaScript, Perl, Lisp, cgi-bin, bash, csh, Matlab, Apache, TeX, etc.
Administrator level experience with Linux and Windows 2000/XP.
Languages: French, native language; uent in English and German.
Hobbies: rock climbing, hiking, biking, skiing, mountaineering (successfully organized and led an expedition to the top
of Mt McKinley, Alaska, in June 1991), travel to remote places.
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