PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Peter N. Belhumeur

Peter Belhumeur is a computer vision researcher whose face-recognition methods grew into apps that identify plants and birds from photographs. After a Brown degree in 1985 and a Harvard doctorate under David Mumford in 1993, he joined the electrical engineering faculty at Yale in 1994 and received a Presidential Early Career Award in 1997. He coauthored a 1996 paper on Eigenfaces and Fisherfaces, moved to Columbia University in 2002, and helped create Leafsnap with the Smithsonian and the University of Maryland in 2011. In 2014, his group released Birdsnap and he started work at Dropbox with David Kriegman; in 2019, he shared the ICCV Helmholtz Prize for a face verification paper. He is a professor of computer science at Columbia University, where he directs the Laboratory for the Study of Visual Appearance.

Badges

Timeline

  1. 1985–2001

    Brown, Harvard and Yale

    He earns a Sc.B. in Information Sciences from Brown University in 1985 and a Ph.D. in Engineering Sciences from Harvard University under David Mumford in 1993. In 1994, he is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Cambridge's Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences. Yale University makes him an assistant professor of electrical engineering in 1994, an associate professor in 1998 and a professor in 2001.

  2. 1996

    The Fisherfaces paper

    In 1996, he coauthors "Eigenfaces vs. Fisherfaces: Recognition Using Class Specific Linear Projection" with João P. Hespanha and David Kriegman, published at the European Conference on Computer Vision.

  3. 1997

    A Presidential Early Career Award

    In 1997, while at Yale, he receives a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, cited for innovative concepts and student laboratories in appearance-based modeling for computer applications. The $500,000 award supports five years of research in computer vision, robotics, face recognition, medical image analysis and virtual environments.

  4. 2002

    Professor at Columbia

    He joins Columbia University as a Professor of Computer Science in 2002 and directs its Laboratory for the Study of Visual Appearance (VAP LAB). His research focus lies in the mix of computer vision, computer graphics and computational photography.

  5. 2011

    Leafsnap with the Smithsonian

    In May 2011, Columbia University, the University of Maryland and the Smithsonian Institution launch Leafsnap, the world's first plant identification mobile app using visual search, which names a tree species from a photograph of its leaves. He leads the Columbia team, which applies mathematical techniques developed for face recognition to species identification.

  6. 2014

    Birdsnap and Dropbox

    In May 2014, Columbia Engineering researchers led by him release Birdsnap, an iPhone app that uses computer vision and machine learning to identify 500 common North American bird species. In September 2014, Dropbox hires him and David Kriegman, the two professors who founded the computer vision company Kriegman-Belhumeur Vision Technology (KBVT).

  7. 2019

    The ICCV Helmholtz Prize

    In 2019, he and Shree Nayar receive the ICCV Helmholtz Prize for "Attribute and Simile Classifiers for Face Verification" (2009), a paper they wrote with Neeraj Kumar and Alexander C. Berg.

  8. As of October 2026

    A deep learning course

    He is a Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University, with interests in computer vision, graphics, image-based rendering and face recognition. He teaches the Fall 2026 course Deep Learning for Computer Vision, which covers convolutional neural nets, Transformers and Vision Transformers.

Career

  1. Since 2002Columbia UniversityProfessor of Computer Science
  2. From 2014Dropbox
  3. From 1994University of CambridgePostdoctoral fellow
  4. 1994–2001Yale UniversityAssistant professor of electrical engineering, Associate professor
  5. Kriegman-Belhumeur Vision TechnologyCo-founder

Education

  1. 1993Harvard UniversityPh.D. in Engineering Sciences
  2. 1985Brown UniversitySc.B. in Information Sciences

From the biography.

  1. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labsIncludes Columbia University. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labs. We compare publishing careers, recent citations, dual appointments and job moves across 2,420 university researchers and 308 frontier-lab researchers.
  2. Nonprofit roles are 2.3 times as common in AI safetyIncludes Columbia University. We estimate where people focused on safety, alignment and evaluation work. Nonprofit roles appear for 25.1% of safety people with known affiliations, compared with 11.0% in other areas.
  3. Universities had a net outflow of 2,068 moves in AI careersIncludes Columbia University. Our estimates of career flows and median h-index across universities and companies in AI, including the role of joint appointments and earlier academic jobs.
  4. People shaping AI work at a median of 3 organizations over a career: 3 for university starters and institute and lab starters, versus 2 for company startersIncludes Columbia University. Across 6,853 people shaping AI with a dated work role, we estimate a median of 3 parent organizations over a career (mean 3.6), comparing role groups, starting sectors and starting decades from the 1950s to 2020–2026.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

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  1. Peter N. Belhumeur cs.columbia.edu. Checked 22 October 2026.
  2. Eigenfaces vs. Fisherfaces: Recognition Using Class Specific Linear Projection | Vision vision.ucsd.edu. Checked 22 October 2026.
  3. Yale Engineer Receives $500,000 Presidential Early Career Award news.yale.edu. Checked 22 October 2026.
  4. Peter N. Belhumeur | NSF - U.S. National Science Foundation nsf.gov. Checked 22 October 2026.
  5. Leafsnap, a new mobile app that identifies plants by leaf shape, is launched by Smithsonian and collaborators smithsonianscience.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  6. Is it a Crow or a Raven? New Birdsnap App Will Tell You! newswise.com. Checked 22 October 2026.
  7. Dropbox Acqui-Hires KBVT's Computer Vision Geniuses To Mine Its Photos techcrunch.com. Checked 22 October 2026.
  8. CS Researchers Receive Test of Time Awards cs.columbia.edu. Checked 22 October 2026.
  9. Peter N. Belhumeur - Home peternbelhumeur.com. Checked 22 October 2026.
  10. Faculty by Name cs.columbia.edu. Checked 22 October 2026.
  11. Deep Learning for Computer Vision deeplearningforcomputervision.com. Checked 22 October 2026.