Dr Ben A.M. Schouten was born in 1953 and graduated from the Rietveld Art Academy in 1983. He found himself interested in patterns and iconography, and after travelling in the Magreb and studying number theory he discovered his fascination for mathematics. During this period he worked both as a professional artist and student, receiving his master’s degree in mathematics, specializing in chaos theory, in August 1995.
In 2001 he received his PhD on content based image retrieval schemes and interfaces that express in an adaptive and intuitive way image similarities according to human perception.
Currently he is project leader for the recently founded research group “Biometrics and Digital Watermarking” at the Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI), Amsterdam.. He is principal contractor within the European funded research project BioVision, which advises the European Committee on the successful deployment of Biometrics within the forthcoming 10 years.
His other research interests are image and video understanding and information visualization. Ben Schouten teaches at the Academy of Technology and Design Utrecht and is Chairman of the Working Group “Research and Development” of the Dutch Biometric Forum. He is a member of the board of the recently founded European Biometric Forum.

1. B.A.M. Schouten and P.M. de Zeeuw. Fractal Transforms and Feature Invariance. ICPR 2000; Proceedings International Conference on Pattern, Recognition, Barcelona 2000, Sept. 3-7, 2000, Barcelona. Editors: A. Sanfeliu, J.J. Villanueva, M. Vanrell, R. Huang, J. Serra. IEEE Computer Society. Volume 3
2. B.A.M. Schouten and P.M. de Zeeuw. Image Databases, Scale and Fractal Transforms. ICIP 2000; Proceedings International Conference on Image Processing, Sept.10-13, 2000, Vancouver. IEEE Computer Society.
3. G. Caenen, G. Frederix, A.A.M. Kuijk, E.J. Pauwels and B.A.M. Schouten. Show me what you mean / PARISS: A CBIR-interface that learns by example. Lecture Notes on Computer Science; Fourth International Conference on Visual Information Systems (VISUAL 2000), Lyon, November 2000, Springer Verlag, pp.257-268.