Bidyut Baran Chaudhuri earned his BSc (Hons), BTech and MTech degrees from University of Calcutta. He obtained his PhD degree from IIT, Kanpur, on electromagnetic wave propagation in dielectric media, which was one of the earliest researches on fibre-optic guide done in India. He joined Indian Statistical Institute in 1978 and started work on the relatively newer discipline of pattern recognition and image processing. In 1981 he went to Queen's University on a Visiting Fellowship and worked on spectroscopic signal processing. During 1986-87 he visited GSF Institute of Strahlenschutz (currently Leibnitz Institute) and developed some powerful techniques on biomedical image processing. The following year he worked as a visiting research faculty at Technical University of Hannover, and jointly developed high rate image compression technique for video telephony. He is the leader of a 17 year-long Indo-German collaboration on biomedical image processing as well as a Indo-French collaboration on document processing problems.

Academic and Research Achievements: Professor Chaudhuri's research contributions fall under five areas: waveguides, pattern recognition, image processing, document processing and natural language processing. He developed some closed form expressions on wave propagation in anisotropic dielectric waveguides. In pattern recognition area he proposed several powerful deterministic, statistical and fuzzy clustering and classification algorithms and applied them to problems of practical importance. He took up various image-processing problems in biomedicine, remote sensing, fingerprint analysis and still/video image data compression. His current interest is on document image processing, OCR, handwriting recognition, signs and symbols identification and document structure analysis. He pioneered the first full-fledged OCR system on Indian Scripts Devanagari and Bangla with high accuracy. Also, for the blind, the first computer-based Indian script Braille system was developed by him. In natural language processing, he developed the Electronic dictionary and Thesaurus, language statistics, automatic readability analysis, spellchecker and morphological processor for Indian languages. He has published 360 articles, written and edited eight books.

Other Contributions: Professor Chaudhuri served as the principal coordinator of 5th generation knowledge-based computer system (KBCS) research centre of ISI (1992-94). A new unit named Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Unit was established under his headship. He is the Vice President of a society on Indian Language Technology Research and helped in correcting some major drawbacks on the international Unicode System for Bangla language. He has served as Editorial Board member of seven international journals.

Awards and Honours: Professor Chaudhuri is the recipient of Leverhume Fellowship Award (1981), Homi Bhabha Fellowship Award (1992), Vikram Sarabhai Research Award (1995), C Achuta Menon Award (1996), Homi Bhaba Research Award: Applied Sciences (2003), Ram Lal Wadhwa Gold Medal (2005), Jawaharlal Nehru Fellowship (2004-06), J C Bose Fellowship (2010- ), among others. He is a Fellow of Indian National Academy of Engineering, International Association for Pattern Recognition, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Third world Academy of Science.