The call for nominations for the 2024 edition of the award is open: deadline for nominations is May 15, 2024.

Pierre Devijver Award winners 

Pierre Devijver (1938-1996)

Reprinted from the biography by Joseph Kittler published on Pattern Recognition Letters shortly after his passing

Pierre Devijver graduated in Telecommunications Engineering from the Royal Military School, Brussels in 1962. His career started in the Belgian army where, during the period 1967-69, he was responsible as the Technical Manager of the 1st NATO satellite communication station. He left the Belgian army in 1969 to join the Philips Research Laboratory in Brussels where he assumed the responsibility for research in pattern recognition with applications to speech and image interpretation. He received his PhD degree from the University of Paris VI in 1977. The research degree was awarded for his work on pattern recognition using the nearest neighbour method, carried out under the supervision of Professor Jean Claude Simon. In 1989 he moved to Brest in France where he became the Scientific Director at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Tlecommunications (ENST). In 1993 he was appointed to Visiting Professorship at the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, University of Surrey. During his scientific career in the field of pattern recognition, which span more than two decades, Professor Devijver gained international recognition for his contributions to statistical approaches of pattern classification. His work on nearest neighbour classifiers, causal Markov random models in speech and image processing, computational geometry, and connected component analysis deserves a particular mention. His seminal work on editing methods for the nearest neighbour classifier resulted in both the restoration of the Bayesian optimality for the nearest neighbour decision rule and its significant computational speed up. His profound understanding of the information content conveyed by nearest neighbours had an impact on error estimation, feature selection and error reject trade-off which his work amply manifests.

Dr. Devijver was one of the founding members of IAPR. He served in the capacity of IAPR Secretary during 1980-84, and as 1st Vice-President in 1984-86. His active service in IAPR culminated with his election to the office of IAPR President in which he served during the period 1986-88. As Past President he chaired the IAPR Nominating Committee in 1988-90 and was actively involved in IAPR Committee work until the summer of 1996. He discharged all his responsibilities most professionally and meticulously. For his scientific contributions to pattern recognition and for his outstanding leadership in IAPR Dr. Devijver was awarded IAPR Fellowship in 1994. In spite (or perhaps because) of his heavy scientific and professional schedule Pierre Devijver was actively involved in extramural activities. He ran a sports club for his colleagues at Philips in Brussels and ENST in Brest to promote physical fitness and kindle team spirit. He himself was a serious Marathon runner, joining regularly Marathons in Brussels and London. He participated in the London Marathon in April 1996, only a few weeks before being unexpectedly struck by a wasting illness. Pierre Devijver is survived by his wife and their three daughters.