He then moved to Switzerland and studied at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne and obtained his MS degree in high-energy physics in 1968.

In 1974 he moved to the United States and worked as a research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

He served as a chairman and/or a member of the scientific committees of several international conferences and on the editorial boards of the Proceedings of the IEEE, Pattern Recognition Letters and Signal Processing.

In 1986 he became a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for contribution to research and educational programs for signal and image processing in Europe.

[citation needed] Several spin-offs came out of his laboratory including Alpvision,[11] Fastcom Technologies,[12] Visiowave, Pixartis[13] and SpinetiX.