Larry Spitz

I have a record of successful systems development. Past projects include applications in document recognition, office automation, image processing, laser scanning, medical diagnosis and monitoring, and communication aids for the handicapped. My strength lies in developing innovative yet practical solutions to problems.
I manage small teams of professional and technical people and do scheduling and budgeting, as well as technical and personnel review.
I am active in the professional community, participating in the organization of workshops and conferences, the review and editing of scientific literature, and developing liaison between research organizations.

Consulting and research in document recognition and the analysis of compressed images for commercial and government clients in the US, Europe and Australasia.

1997 - 2002 President,Document Recognition Technologies, Inc.

Predecessor to DocRec Ltd.

1995 - 1997 Principal Scientist, Daimler Benz Research and Technology Center.

Research in multilingual document recognition and the analysis of compressed images. Applied character shape coding technology to postal address reading improving speed by factors of 30 to 130 with no compromise in accuracy.

1992 - 1995 Principal Scientist, Fuji Xerox Palo Alto Laboratory.

Founded a research laboratory which had as its principal focus multilingual document recognition and understanding.
Research in techniques for the processing of multilingual documents, language identification, character shape coding, linkage of document analysis and information retrieval, high speed optical character recognition, and manipulation of documents in compressed representation.

1985 - 1994 Senior Member of the Research Staff, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.

Initiated the PARC research effort in document recognition, building a team of researchers addressing problems of pattern recognition, raster to vector conversion, page layout representation, and document logical structure inference. Organized and conducted workshops and formed committees to coordinate the corporate effort in document recognition. Spent considerable time in Japan leading a team of researchers on a project in multilingual document recognition.

1983 - 1985 Senior Engineer, Cygnet Systems, Incorporated.

Developed a document image understanding system and algorithms for resolution conversion and compression of document images.

1981 - 1983 Project Leader, Hewlett-Packard Laboratories.

Inventor and project leader on the development of a low cost, variable resolution document scanner incorporating understanding of the scanned image.

1978 - 1981 Research Scientist, Telesensory Systems Incorporated.

Responsible for the development of an automatic reading machine for the blind.

1973 - 1978 Senior Systems Analyst, Stanford University School of Medicine.

Developed a real time system for the analysis of on-line cardiac catheterization data and a system for the high speed analysis of ambulatory electrocardiograms.

Fellow of the International Association for Pattern Recognition

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
International Association for Pattern Recognition
        Chairman, Conferences & Meetings committee
Nelson Science Society

Technical Committees

TC-2 Structural and syntactic pattern recognition
TC-10 Graphics processing
TC-11 Text processing

Pattern Recognition Society
Association for Computational Linguistics
American Society for Information Science
SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering
Bay Area OCR (co-founder)

International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (Chair 2001)
Symposium on Document Analysis and Information Retrieval (Chair 1995)
International Workshop on Web Document Analysis
Syntactic and Structural Pattern Recognition
Document Analysis Systems (Chair 1994)
SPIE - Document Recognition and Retrieval
Document Layout Interpretation and its Applications Workshop
Performance Evaluation Issues in Multilingual OCR Workshop
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

Reviewer
IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics
Pattern Recognition
Pattern Recognition Letters
Image and Vision Computing Journal
IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems
Information Processing and Management
Journal of Electronic Imaging
Principles of Document Processing
National Science Foundation
European Union
Foundation for Research, Science and Technology (New Zealand)
Workshop on Digital Image Computing
Image and Vision Computing New Zealand

Patents
5,075,896 Character and phoneme recognition based on probability clustering
5,210,824 Encoding-format-desensitized methods for interchanging electronic documents as appearances
5,245,676 Determination of image skew angle from CCITT G4 compressed data
5,375,176 Roman character and word gross classification based on connected component spatial relationships
5,384,864 Automatic determination of text line, word and character cell spatial features
5,414,781 Logotype detection in CCITT G4 compressed images
5,425,110 Asian language classification based on an optical density function
5,438,628 Information retrieval based on character shape codes and shape tokens
5,444,797 Script class determination based on pass code position distribution
5,513,304 Enhanced automatic determination of text line dependent parameters

International Journal of Document Analysis and Recognition, Springer-Verlag