Tribute: Maria Petrou

Maria Petrou, Professor of Signal Processing died from cancer on 15 October at the age of 59. Professor Richard Vinter pays tribute to his colleague.

Maria Petrou, Professor of Signal Processing (Electrical and Electronic Engineering), died from cancer on 15 October at the age of 59. Professor Richard Vinter (EEE) pays tribute to his colleague.

“The untimely death of Maria Petrou after a brief illness is a great loss to her family and friends. It has also deprived the academic community of distinguished researcher, a dedicated teacher and a champion for women in engineering.

If a professional colleague were asked the question what Maria ‘did’, the likely answer would be ‘image processing’ - the science of enhancing indistinct, possibly corrupted, digital imagery and extracting significant underlying information. Her work in this important field was, however, merely the most recent resting point in an academic career striking for its breadth and diversity.

The range of research activities she undertook is, in part, a testament to her intelligence, dynamism and scientific curiosity. But her career trajectory also reflected her willingness to re-invent herself and acquire new skills. It likewise bore witness to the obstacles faced by women of her generation, establishing themselves in a traditionally male profession.

Like many creative and versatile academic engineers, she had a background in theoretical physics, gaining a PhD in Astrophysics from the University of Cambridge. She went on to obtain a tenured post at the University of Athens in theoretical physics before returning to England for a postdoctoral appointment at Oxford.

At a time of increased government funding for the applied sciences in the early 1980’s, Maria shifted to technology research, taking up short term positions at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and then at Reading University, where she worked on remote sensing and gave postgraduate courses in signal processing.

Her growing reputation in a range of fields centered on computer vision and image processing saw her achieve her first academic post at a British institution in 1988 at the University of Surrey, which was well known for its work in satellite communications and related fields. She remained at Surrey until 1995, rising to the position of Professor of Image Analysis. She then moved to Imperial, having been appointed Professor of Signal Processing. She was Head of the Communications and Signal Processing Group in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering until 2009. She subsequently accepted the position of Director of the Informatics and Telematics Institute of CERTH, Thessaloniki, Greece, while retaining a quarter-time position at Imperial.

Maria Petrou spoke of herself as a problem solver, and enthusiastically took on projects involving the application of general principles of image processing, computer vision and pattern recognition, to medical, geo-scientific sensing and other fields.  But she also contributed significantly to fundamental theory, for example in the development of a technique for image enhancement, called the trace transformation, which has become a powerful tool in face recognition and other important areas.

She received numerous honours for her research contributions, including a Fellowship of the Royal Academy of Engineering. She also found time to write numerous articles of a journalistic nature, book reviews and conference reports.

An unfailing advocate for women in engineering, she was active in organisations, such as Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) and the Women’s Engineering Society (WES), aiming to increase female participation.

She took the responsibility of PhD research supervision extremely seriously. Her many students benefited from her insights into promising research directions, her technical skills, the training she provided in independent thinking, and her deep concern for their wellbeing.

Maria was a supremely clear-minded person. In discussion, any position she took was backed by a fierce logic, compellingly articulated. She campaigned for human rights and publicised abuses, for example the ill-treatment of household servants at the hand of wealthy employers in certain parts of the world.

A deeply engrained rationalism co-existed in her personality with warmth and a sense of fun. Her newsletters were often playful and illustrated with her own distinctive, humorous cartoons. She was uninhibited in expressing her opinions. She maintained a Greek language blog, on which she shared her views on a wide range of topics, from politics and economics to art and film. In the final stages of her illness she was unable to read or speak. She uploaded her final contribution to her blog just 16 days before she died, no doubt communicating through a friend. It is extremely sad that her continuing passionate desire to engage with the world was brought to a close so prematurely.”