Dr. Pradeep Buddharaju

My current research interests are in health games, medical imaging, and biometrics. Over the years, I have been involved in a number of different efforts, which only opened my appetite for more. At this time, I am involved in the Stress and Walk n' Play projects.

I received the BTech degree from Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University (JNTU), Andhra Pradesh, India, and the MS degree from the University of Houston, both in computer science. I am currently a post-doc at the Computational Physiology Lab (CPL) in the Computer Science Department, of the University of Houston. My research interests include biometric authentication, medical imaging, and health gaming. My PhD dissertation topic was “Physiology-based face recognition in the thermal infrared spectrum.” I developed a novel face recognition algorithm that extracts the superficial vasculature from the face and uses the vascular network as  a feature set for matching. To the best of my knowledge, this work represents the first attempt to use the true physiological information on the face for biometric authentication. I have written several scientific papers and book chapters based on this work, including a recent article in the journal IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (Impact Factor: 3.810).

I worked as a summer research intern at Honeywell Laboratories in 2004, 2005, and 2006. I am the recipient of the Motorola Outstanding Paper Award at the Third International Summer School on Biometrics, Alghero, Italy, in 2006. I also received the Best Teaching Assistant Award from the Department of Computer Science, University of Houston, in 2004.