Hans du Buf is a Dutch scientist known for his research in visual perception, computer vision and pattern recognition. He was professor at the University of the Algarve in Faro, Portugal, from 1994 until his mandatory retirement at 70 in 2021. He also worked on cognitive robotics, computer graphics and parallel computing.
Hans du Buf, aka J.M.H. du Buf was born on March 29, 1951, in Venlo, the Netherlands. He first studied electrical engineering at the HTS there, a low-level polytechnic. He finished his MSc at the Technical University of Eindhoven TUE in 1983. He then worked at the Institute for Perception Research (IPO), a collaboration between TUE and Philips Research Laboratories NatLab. He obtained his PhD degree from TUE in 1987. After this, he worked 7.5 years as a postdoc in the Signal Processing Laboratory at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology EPFL in Lausanne, before moving to the University of the Algarve UAlg in Faro, Portugal, in 1994.
He is associate professor, his teaching included digital systems, computer architecture, computer graphics as well as image processing. He supervised 6 PhD students and numerous MSc students, not only Portuguese but also Dutch, German and Iranian.
His PhD was on visual psychophysics, more specifically on the perception of brightness and contrast (conspicuity) of spatial patterns, and the development of non-linear, multi-channel models. PhD thesis: Spatial characteristics of brightness and apparent-contrast perception. (JMH du Buf, Technical University of Eindhoven, the Netherlands, 1987, pp 165.) You can download the pdf from TUE. Five chapters were published in the journal Spatial Vision, which was continued as Multisensory Reseach by BRILL.
At EPFL, this work evolved into texture segmentation by using Gabor filters as a model of cortical simple and complex cells, and the role of Gabor phase information in texture processing as well as for an accurate detection of lines and edges in images.
This was complemented by cortical end-stopped cells for detecting keypoints (line and edge crossings, junctions), which lead to multi-scale line, edge and keypoint representations that were used for object categorisation and recognition.
Later work at UAlg focused on developing advanced biological models for optical flow (object- and egomotion), stereo disparity, focus-of-attention and gist vision with spatial layout: which types of objects are about where in a visual scene. The goal was to integrate all models on a mobile platform with a stereo camera, also two microphones for sound-source localisation and recognition, with sequencing of atomic visuomotor actions. This is called cognitive robotics, which also integrates short- and long-term memories, episodic memory (which objects have you seen where), egospace, and hierarchical maps for local and global navigation.
Hans du Buf participated in various European and Portuguese research projects. The old VISIONlab page still shows the list.
He was the coordinator of the European diatom project ADIAC. The final scientific report was published as a book: Automatic Diatom Identification. (H du Buf and MM Bayer (eds), World Scientific, Series in Machine Perception and Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 51, 2002.) See DETAILS. Old webpages and data sets are still available at Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh, UK, ADIAC at RBGE.
He was Associate Editor of the Int J of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence: IJPRAI.
He was a member of the ISR - Institute for Systems and Robotics at the Tecnico in Lisbon, the IEEE Computer Society, as well as the Portuguese Association for Pattern Recognition APRP and the International Association for Pattern Recognition IAPR
HdB's modeling of visual detection data on different spatial patterns was motivated by the pioneering work of Wolfgang Jaschinski at IfADo (TU Dortmund). See: Jaschinski-Kruza and Cavonius (1984) A multiple channel model for grating detection, Vision Res 24, 933-941.) Hans du Buf met Wolfgang only once in 1983 at the ECVP (European Conference on Visual Perception) in Lucca, Italy. Like HdB, Wolfgang was also inspired by the theoretical ideas put forward by the famous Dutch "vision couple" Jan Koenderink and Andrea van Doorn. See: Koenderink and van Doorn (1982) Invariant features of contrast detection: an explanation in terms of self-similar detector arrays, J Opt Soc Am 72, 83-87.)
His early work on Gabor filters was influenced by the late David J Sakrison at Berkeley. See: Mostafavi and Sakrison (1976) Structure and properties of a single channel in the human visual system, Vision Res 16, 957-968.) Also by Stjepan Marcelja. See: Marcelja (1980) Mathematical description of the responses of simple cortical cells, J Opt Soc Am 70, 1297-1300.)
Finally, his work on multi-scale keypoint detection was triggered by the end-stopped cortical cell model by Friedrich Heitger, then at ETHZ. See: Heitger, Rosenthaler, von der Heydt and Kuebler (1992) Simulation of neural contour mechanisms: from simple to end-stopped cells, Vision Res 32, 963-981.) Hans du Buf met Friedrich before, also in 1983 at the ECVP in Lucca, together with Ruediger von der Heydt from Johns Hopkins, and their mutual colleague and friend Uwe Mortensen, from Muenster University. HdB, RvdH and UM later met at various ECVPs.
For the complete list of 192 publications, with some humbug, see the publication list
As of 1/8/2026, his PhD thesis was downloaded 507 times.
ResearchGate mentioned 166 publications, 22,455 reads, 2413 citations
and 50 co-authors.
ScienceDirect (from Elsevier) mentioned 75 publications, with 985 citations of
830 documents, 102 co-authors, and an h-index of 15 (at least 15 papers each with
at least 15 citations).
One longer-term student project concerned the development of a vision aid for visually impaired or blind persons wearing a small computer with a camera at chest-height. This project, called Blavigator from blind navigator, was financed by the Portugues Research Foundation FCT. A video demo was published by Iranian MSc student Somayeh Shahrabadi on YouTube: watch blavigator, with speech synthesis in a corridor.
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