Zoltán Kató

In 1990, after graduating, he won a French state scholarship, with the help of which he first obtained a so-called DEA (Diplôme d'études approfondies - French post-master's) degree in 1991 at the University of Nice, and then in the fall of the same year he began his doctoral studies at the INRIA-Sophia Antipolis research institute, which he completed with a PhD degree with honors in 1994. He then worked as a researcher and guest lecturer at several prestigious foreign universities and research institutes (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), Hong Kong; Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), Amsterdam; National University of Singapore (NUS), Singapore).

He settled back home in 2002 and has been a lecturer at the University of Szeged (SZTE) since then, and a professor since 2015. As a visiting lecturer, he is a professor at the Selye János University (Komárom, Slovakia) across the border.

His research interests include computer vision and image processing, including Markov image modeling in the fields of remote sensing and microscopy. He developed variational methods for image segmentation and novel 2D and 3D image registration procedures, which were successfully applied to medical images. His achievements in the field of non-point-based image correspondences enabled the development of novel camera positioning methods and 3D reconstruction of planar shapes, which were applied in an industrial project. His research work was recognized with the National Excellence Award in 2015. His students have also won numerous awards.

Member of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) Signal Processing Society (Senior Member since 2007); for 4 years he was the voting representative of Hungary in the IAPR (International Association of Pattern Recognition). Member of ELLIS (European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Society) since 2021. Founding member, then president and board member between 2011-15 of the Hungarian Image Processing and Pattern Recognition Society (KÉPAF), established within the framework of the John von Neumann Computer Science Society (NJSZT) – this activity was also recognized by the NJSZT with the Neumann Prize (2023). Since 2011, he has been a voting member of the Informatics Scientific Committee of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA); and between 2021-2024, he is the chairman of the Informatics and Electrical Engineering jury of the OTKA (National Scientific Research Funds).