Jürgen Schürmann

Timeline

1. 1960–1968

   From TU Berlin to AEG-Telefunken

   He earns a Dipl.-Ing. in communications engineering at TU Berlin in 1960 and joins the AEG-Telefunken research institute in Ulm in 1963, where he starts teaching computers to read digits on forms. In 1968, he completes a Dr.-Ing. at TU Berlin with a thesis on applying regression analysis to character recognition.

2. 1970–1981

   Books and an honorary professorship

   In 1970, he and G. Meyer-Brötz publish Methoden der automatischen Zeichenerkennung with Oldenbourg, the first German book on character recognition, and his Polynomklassifikatoren für die Zeichenerkennung follows in 1977. His work on reading and sorting letters helps AEG become a world leader in postal automation, and TU Darmstadt makes him an honorary professor in 1981.

3. 1993–1997

   Associate editor of Pattern Recognition

   He serves on the DAGM Technical Committee from 1993 to 1997 and becomes an associate editor of the journal Pattern Recognition in 1994. His group lays groundwork for document analysis systems used in postal address readers and sorting machines.

4. 1996

   The book Pattern Classification

   In April 1996, Wiley publishes his Pattern Classification: A Unified View of Statistical and Neural Approaches, which relates statistical methods, polynomial regression, multilayer perceptrons and radial basis functions. He heads the Pattern Understanding Group at the Daimler-Benz Research Center in Ulm and teaches at TU Darmstadt, and his department contributes to the Verbmobil speech-understanding project and to real-time traffic-sign recognition in the PROMETHEUS project.

5. 1997

   Chairing ICDAR'97 in Ulm

   He chairs ICDAR'97, the 4th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, held in Ulm in 1997, and joins the editorial board of the International Journal of Document Analysis and Recognition. He retires at the end of 1997 as head of the Musterverstehen (pattern understanding) department of Daimler-Benz Research in Ulm, which works on text, speech and image understanding and signal processing.

6. 1998

   An IAPR fellowship

   The International Association for Pattern Recognition names him a Fellow in 1998 at ICPR in Brisbane, for contributions to character recognition and polynomial classifiers and for service to IAPR.

7. 1999

   The ICDAR Lifetime Award

   In 1999, at the ICDAR conference in Bangalore, India, he receives the ICDAR Lifetime Award.

8. 2001

   Death at 66

   He dies in January 2001, aged 66, after a short, serious illness. In an obituary, DAGM chair H. Burkhardt notes the national and international attention given to his work on polynomial classifier design and on comparing statistical approaches with neural networks.