Obituary of Maria Petrou (1953-2012)

Maria Petrou, a Greek-born British scientist, who was known for the development of several image recognition techniques, passed away on 15 October, 2012, from cancer.

Born in Thessaloniki, Greece, in 1953, she studied physics at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and earned a PhD in astrophysics from Cambridge University. After a postdoctoral position at Oxford, she held positions at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and Reading University before moving to the University of Surrey in 1988. In 1995 she moved to Imperial College London where she worked until 2009, before returning to Thessaloniki at the institute of CERTH.

Working in the fields of robotics and image-processing, she discovered the ‘trace transformation’ technique for encoding information in an image regardless of scaling or rotation, which has been important in the development of face-recognition systems. She also developed other techniques for image analysis.