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The article profiles Rama Chellappa, professor at the University of Maryland in Baltimore and a pioneer of image processing and computer vision. While psychophysicists and neuroscientists investigate human vision, computer science has looked at it another way by trying to make machines that can see. Chellappa has gone beyond simple pattern recognition, into an area that tries to find ways of extracting useful information from an image. He is in the top four people in computational image processing and is very well known in the image-processing community and the computer-vision community. He has done seminal work in both areas, and builds bridges between the two communities. The work that received the most attention, and has been extremely well cited, is concerned with motion recovery. He has also pioneered the Markov Random Field Model for texture analysis and synthesis. His aim is to understand what is going on in human vision research and try to replicate some of its performance. Chellappa is very much driven by the applications for his research. He believes that machines can be made that can go into environments hostile to humans and perform tasks autonomously. But he accepts that there is still has a lot to be done to completely understand the mechanics of human vision.

This article reports on the judgment of a federal court of Baltimore, Maryland, which dismissed the plea of Maryland Optometric Association (MOA) against Davis Vision Inc. and CareFirst Inc. In the suit, the MOA alleged that Davis Vision and CareFirst unlawfully restrained competition in the sale of prescription eyeglasses. The MOA also contended that the defendants established a two-tier reimbursement system. The suit was dismissed on December 21, 2004 on account of insufficiency of evidences presented by MOA.