Helen Chan Wolf

In the early 1960s, Wolf worked with Charles Bisson and Woody Bledsoe at Panoramic Research to train computers in recognising human faces (so-called automated facial recognition).^[1][2] Early computer programs used humans to coordinate a set of features from images of faces and then a computer for the recognition.^[3] These features included things such as the positions the inside and outside corners of eyes and mouth. Operators such as these could process around forty pictures an hour.^{[citation needed]}

Wolf joined the Artificial Intelligence group at SRI International (then Stanford Research Institute) in 1966.^[4] At the SRI Chan was part of the Application of Intelligent Automata to Reconnaissance project.^[4][5] Here she worked on Shakey the robot, the world's first mobile autonomous robot, which was honoured by an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Milestone in 2017.^[6][7] Shakey used artificial intelligence, making its own plans, navigating between places and improving through learning. Wolf developed the algorithms that extracted coordinates from images.^[6] Before Shakey, there were no efforts to integrate artificial intelligence and robotics into a single moving vehicle.^[8]

Her publications include:

• Wolf, Helen C. (1977). "Experiments in Map-Guided Photo Interpretation" (PDF). Proceedings of the Fifth IJCAI. Cambridge, Mass. p. 696.
• Wolf, Helen C. (1977). "Parametric Correspondence and Chamfer Matching: Two New Techniques for Image Matching". Technical Note. Archived from the original on December 30, 2019.
• Wolf, Helen C. (Feb 1994). "Locating perceptually salient points on planar curves". IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. 16 (2): 113–129. doi:10.1109/34.273737.
• Wolf, Helen C. (1987). "Linear Delineation". Readings in Computer Vision: 204–209. doi:10.1016/B978-0-08-051581-6.50025-8. ISBN 9780080515816.