Keiichi Abe

Timeline

1. 1985

   Associate professor at Shizuoka

   In 1985, as an associate professor in Shizuoka University's Faculty of Engineering, he leads a grant on combining grammatical inference with syntactic pattern recognition for image understanding and scene analysis.

2. 1986–1987

   Fast thinning algorithms

   As a professor in Shizuoka's Faculty of Engineering, he leads a 1986–1987 study of shape analysis in binary images. The study yields a corner-point detector based on local symmetry and two fast thinning algorithms, one sequential using distance transformation and one parallel with two subcycles.

3. 1994–1996

   Structural recognition of shapes

   From 1994 to 1995, he leads a cooperative research project on the structural perception and recognition of shapes, with co-investigators from Kyoto, Nagoya, Osaka and Kyushu universities and Toyohashi University of Technology. At a December 1995 meeting, he presents the state of the art in binary image processing, and his paper “Parts of planar shapes” appears in Pattern Recognition in 1996.

4. 1995–2005

   Professor in the Faculty of Information

   He is a professor in Shizuoka University's Faculty of Information from 1995 to 2005. From 1996 to 1998, he leads a project on shared courses for the faculty's Department of Computer Science and Department of Information Arts, bridging engineering with the liberal arts and social sciences.

5. 1998

   IAPR Fellow

   The International Association for Pattern Recognition names him a Fellow in 1998 for contributions to structural pattern recognition and for service to IAPR.

6. 1999–2002

   Color segmentation and runway inspection

   From 1999 to 2000, he leads research on segmenting color images in line with human color perception, including a comparison of eleven color spaces using human classification experiments. In 2002, with engineers from Kawasaki Heavy Industries, he coauthors a paper on an autonomous runway inspection system that uses ultraviolet image sensors.

7. 2006–2011

   Professor at Aichi Institute of Technology

   In 2006, he is a professor at Aichi Institute of Technology. Writing from there in 2011 for the Japan Association for Social Informatics, he argues that the Internet may erode high-quality content and weaken thinking and human relations, especially among younger people.

8. As of October 2026

   Professor emeritus at Shizuoka

   He is a professor emeritus at Shizuoka University, in its Faculty of Informatics. In a 2019 paper for the Society of Socio-Informatics, he asks why most Japanese citizens, politicians and media show no concern about a government debt of 1,100 trillion yen.