:Laurent Itti

{{Short description|American computer scientist (born 1970)}}

{{more footnotes|date=February 2013}}

File:Laurent Itti.jpg

Laurent Itti (born December 12, 1970, in Tours, France) is a computational neuroscientist. He received his MS in image processing from the École Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications de Paris in 1994, and a PhD in computation and neural systems from Caltech in 2000. He is currently an associate professor of computer science, psychology, and neuroscience at the University of Southern California, where he has been since 2000.

As a PhD student under the tutelage of Christof Koch, Itti developed a computer model that simulates brain mechanisms involved in the deployment of visual attention.{{Cite journal|title=CSDL | IEEE Computer Society|doi=10.1109/34.730558|s2cid=3108956 }}{{Cite journal|title=A saliency-based search mechanism for overt and covert shifts of visual attention|first1=L.|last1=Itti|first2=C.|last2=Koch|date=April 2, 2000|journal=Vision Research|volume=40|issue=10–12|pages=1489–1506|doi=10.1016/s0042-6989(99)00163-7|pmid=10788654|s2cid=192077|doi-access=free}} This so-called saliency model has been cited by thousands of peer-reviewed publications. The software implementation of this model is part of the iLab Neuromorphic Vision Toolkit,{{Cite web|url=http://ilab.usc.edu/toolkit/|title=iLab Neuromorphic Vision C++ Toolkit (iNVT)|website=ilab.usc.edu}} which is freely distributed under the GNU general public license.

Itti has also been very active in developing computer vision applications, particularly in the context of autonomous vehicles (both terrestrial{{Cite web|url=http://ilab.usc.edu/wiki/index.php/Beobot_2.0|title=Beobot 2.0 - ILabWiki|date=February 27, 2010|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100227000920/http://ilab.usc.edu/wiki/index.php/Beobot_2.0|archive-date=2010-02-27}}{{Cite web|url=http://ilab.usc.edu/beobots/|title=Welcome to the Beobot Project|website=ilab.usc.edu}} and underwater) as well as in comparing model simulations to empirical measurements based on a wide spectrum of techniques, including eye tracking, psychophysics, neuroimaging, and electrophysiology.{{Cite web|url=http://ilab.usc.edu/research/|title=iLab Research Home Page|website=ilab.usc.edu}}

Itti is credited with authoring several dozens of peer-reviewed publications{{Cite web|url=http://ilab.usc.edu/publications/|title=iLab Publications - University of Southern California|website=ilab.usc.edu}} and 3 image processing patents.{{Cite web|url=http://ilab.usc.edu/publications/patent.html|title=iLab Publications - University of Southern California|website=ilab.usc.edu}} He also co-developed the Coregistration for Neuroimaging Systems{{Cite web|url=http://ilab.usc.edu/cns/|title=Coregistration for Neuroimaging Systems (CNS) Home Page|website=ilab.usc.edu}} software package, a suite of image processing tools for analyzing neuroimaging data, which is routinely used by several hospitals and research labs in the U.S. and Europe.