Tas Venetsanopoulos continued to actively supervise his research group at the University of Toronto, and was a highly sought-after consultant throughout his career.
Over a period of four decades, he established himself in the worldwide telecommunications and signal processing community as an outstanding researcher, scholar, professor and consultant.
[5] He made contributions to telecommunications, signal and image processing, multimedia and biometrics research by authoring and co-authoring many journal papers and books.
His pioneering and fundamental research contributions, along with the writing of numerous graduate-level books, opened up new vistas in several fields, including telecommunications; multidimensional filter theory and design; the design of non-linear filters; multimedia neural networks; biometrics applications and WLAN positioning systems.
[citation needed] Telecommunications Professor Venetsanopoulos' early work dealt with the problem of optimal detection and signal design, to facilitate communication over purely random, general, linear, time-varying, very noisy, undersea acoustic channels.
Professor Venetsanopoulos developed and tested a number of first and second generation morphological pyramidal techniques, which achieved compression ratios of around 100:1 for good quality, lossy, still image transmission.
Signal and image processing Professor Venetsanopoulos was one of the first Canadian researchers to make a contribution to the foundations of two-dimensional and multi-dimensional digital filtering.
His early contributions in these areas provided the basis for a variety of techniques that led to efficient two-dimensional filter design.
Fuzzy membership functions based on different distance measures were adopted to determine the weights of new nonlinear, adaptive filters.
From that year, he contributed to the area of multimedia data mining and information retrieval by addressing two key technical challenges: a) the problem of similarity determination within the visual data domain, b) the interactive learning of user intentions and automatic adjustment of system parameters for improved retrieval accuracy.
The scheme he developed addresses the drawbacks of the histogram techniques, it is flexible, and outperforms established retrieval systems.
He also developed an interactive learning algorithm for resolving ambiguities arising due to the mismatch between machine-representation of images and human context-dependent interpretation of visual content.
Biometrics research For thousands of years, humans have used visually-perceived body characteristics such as face and gait to recognize one another.
Face and gait recognition belong to the field of biometrics, a very active area of research in computer science, mainly motivated by government and security-related considerations.
In order to deal with these tensor objects effectively, Venetsanopoulos and his research team developed a framework of multilinear subspace learning, so that computation and memory demands are reduced, natural structure and correlation in the original data are preserved, and more compact and useful features can be obtained.
The Model-based gait recognition approach considers a human subject as an articulated object, represented by various body poses.
Professor Venetsanopoulos proposed a full-body, layered deformable model (LDM) inspired by the manually labeled body-part-level silhouettes.
Venetsanopoulos joined the department of electrical and computer engineering (ECE) at the University of Toronto in September 1968 as a lecturer.
[12] During his tenure, the "Great Minds" campaign of the Faculty raised $124 Million in external donations, matched by an equal amount of funds from granting agencies and foundations.
He served as lecturer in 138 short courses to industry and continuing education programs and as consultant to numerous organizations.
On 30 June 2010, Venetsanopoulos retired from the position of vice-president research and innovation at Ryerson and took a one-year administrative leave and subsequently joined the department of electrical and computer engineering.
"[14] In December 2011, Venetsanopoulos was appointed, "Distinguished Advisor to the Vice President Research and Innovation" and continued his full-time academic duties as a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Ryerson University until his death.
Venetsanopoulos served as chairperson on numerous boards, councils and technical conference committees of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).
He was a member of the Communications, Circuits and Systems, Computer, and Signal Processing Societies of IEEE, as well as a member of Sigma Xi, the Association for Computing Machinery, the American Society for Engineering Education, the Technical Chamber of Greece, and the Association of Professional Engineers of Ontario (APEO) and Greece.