New Board Member Brings Expertise in Image Processing and Computer Vision

Santa Clara, Calif.—October 22, 2012 — Picarro Inc., Picarro Inc., the world's leading producer of systems for greenhouse gas and stable isotope analysis, today announced the addition of Luc Vincent, a director of engineering at Google Inc., as the newest member of its scientific advisory board. Dr. Vincent is an internationally recognized expert in the fields of computer vision, imaging, and document analysis. He joins a distinguished team of world-renowned experts in the fields of engineering, physics, and chemistry, adding deep technical expertise to Picarro's advisory board.

As director of engineering at Google, Dr. Vincent heads a number of Google Maps-related projects, including Google Street View. Prior to his work at Google, Dr. Vincent was chief scientist and then vice president of document imaging at LizardTech, Inc., a developer of advanced image compression software, where he was responsible for all aspects of the company's document imaging product line. Earlier in his career, Dr. Vincent led an R&D team at the prestigious Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Additionally, he was director of software development at Scansoft, Inc. (now Nuance Communications, Inc.) and held various technical management positions at Xerox Corporation. 

"We are incredibly honored to have Luc join our team of scientific advisors," said Eric Crosson, chief technology officer at Picarro. "Luc's vast technical expertise will be of great value to the Picarro team as we realize our dream of integrating our world-class instruments and geo-informatics software with the next generation of spatial imaging, analytics, and document analysis tools to create an unparalleled user experience for our customers. We are absolutely thrilled to have Luc onboard."

Dr. Vincent has received a multitude of honors for his work and has published more than 60 research reports related to computer vision, image analysis, and document understanding. He recently served as associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI) and the Journal of Electronic Imaging and is a reviewer of numerous other journals and publications. He also served as a conference chair for the SPIE (formerly the Society of Photographic Instrumentation Engineers) Document Recognition and Retrieval conference and the International Symposium on Mathematical Morphology (ISMM), and has served on program committees for numerous other conferences and workshops. Dr. Vincent earned his Ph.D. in mathematical morphology from the École des Mines de Paris and was a post-doctoral fellow at the Harvard Robotics Laboratory, where he published and extended the morphological algorithmic techniques developed during his Ph.D. work. Dr. Vincent also holds several technical patents.

"Picarro has built a world-class scientific instrument platform, which has enabled scientists to conduct experiments and analysis literally anywhere on Earth their research takes them," said Dr. Vincent.  "With the addition of cloud-based data analytics tools combined with temporal and spatial imaging services, Picarro can now deliver a powerful, user-friendly platform to a range of new industrial customers. I am very excited to collaborate with Eric and the Picarro team as they continue to expand upon their product and solution offerings in new markets."  

The addition of Dr. Vincent to the Picarro Scientific Advisory Board comes on the heels of a number of important milestones for the company. Earlier this month, Picarro announced a three-year managed services contract with Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) for multiple Picarro Surveyor^TM natural gas leak detection systems. In the third quarter of 2012, Picarro secured $7 million in new financing and announced the addition of two new executives to its leadership team, Vice President of Marketing Suresh Pisharody and Vice President of Business Development Tim Clark.