Doctoral Dissertation Awards

IUPRAI- Doctoral Dissertation Award Program

IUPRAI (Indian Unit of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence) - Doctoral Dissertation Award program has been established to recognize and encourage excellence in research and writing by doctoral candidates in the areas of Computer Vision, Computer Graphics, Image Processing and Pattern Recognition. IUPRAI -Doctoral Dissertation Award are presented biannually at the ICVGIP (Indian Conference on Computer Vision, Graphics and Image processing) conference. The award for 2025-2026 will be conferred during the ICVGIP 2026 Conference, to be held during December, 2026 at ISI Kolkata.

Eligibility and Nomination Process

Previous Winners

The previous winners of this prestigious award were

2025
  • Harsh Rangwani for his thesis titled "Learning from Limited and Imperfect Data".
    Advisor: Prof. R. Venkatesh Babu @IISc Bangalore
  • Lalit Manam for his thesis titled "Global Methods for Camera Motion Estimation".
    Advisor: Prof. Venu Madhav Govindu @IISc Bangalore
2024
  • Sravanti Addepalli for her thesis titled "Efficient and Effective Algorithms for Improving the Robustness of Deep Neural Networks".
    Advisor: Prof. R. Venkatesh Babu @IISc Bangalore
  • Salman Siddique Khan for his thesis titled "Learning-based Scene Reconstruction, Design and Inference in Lensless Imaging".
    Advisor: Prof. Kaushik Mitra @IIT Madras
2023
  • Joseph K J for his thesis titled "Towards and Beyond Continually Learning Neural Networks".
    Advisor: Prof. Vineeth N Balasubramanian @IIT Hyderabad
  • Siddharth Asokan for his thesis titled "On the Optimality of Generative Adversarial Networks — A Variational Perspective".
    Advisor: Prof. Chandra Sekhar Seelamantula @IISc Bangalore
  • Jogendra Nath Kundu for his thesis titled "Self-Supervised Domain Adaptation Frameworks for Computer Vision Tasks".
    Advisor: Prof. R. Venkatesh Babu @IISc Bangalore
2022 and earlier will be updated here.

Eligibility Criteria for Applicants

All candidates who have defended their thesis between 1st October 2025 and 30th September 2026 are eligible to apply. The dissertation must be in any one of the following areas:

  • Computer Vision
  • Image Processing
  • Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning
  • Computer Graphics

The dissertation must have been submitted for a doctoral degree in a recognized University/Institution only in India. Only English language versions of the thesis will be accepted.

Nomination Process

The deadline for nomination is November 07, 2026. Each nomination should be forwarded by the thesis advisor (not the student). The nomination should be one zipped file from the thesis advisor, which should include (all information will be kept strictly confidential):

  • Title of the dissertation
  • Name of the student
  • Date of submission and date of defense
  • University/Institution where the dissertation is submitted
  • Area of the dissertation - IP / PR & ML / CV / CG
  • List of publications (only reviewed journals and conferences/workshops etc. — state impact factor or Rank/h5-index, for each case, if available) out of the dissertation.
  • Electronic version of the thesis and its synopsis
  • Nomination letter (specifically for this award, not an open one) by the thesis advisor highlighting significance of the thesis. This letter must also include:
    • Name, address, and phone number of the advisor
    • Name, mailing address, and email address of the candidate

Each nomination must be mailed as a single zip file by the research supervisor, before November 07, 2026 to the address:

Subject: IUPRAI Dissertaion Award Nomination

Important Dates

Submission deadline: November 07, 2026

Review Process

The nomination letter, list of publications and summary of the thesis will be used in the initial screening phase to shortlist dissertations for subsequent in-depth evaluation.

A screening committee will shortlist the theses from among the nominations. Shortlisted dissertations will be reviewed based on:

  • Technical depth and significance of the research contribution
  • Potential impact on theory and practice
  • Quality of presentation

IUPRAI-ICVGIP will form a committee of 3–5 experts each year for shortlisting and selection. The process will be finalized before the ICVGIP conference, and the award will be announced at the event.

The decision of the committee will be final, and no requests for review or revision will be entertained.

Award Committee

  • A. N. Rajagopalan (IITM) - Chair
  • Sumantra Datta Roy (IITD) - Member
  • Anoop M. Namboodri (IIITH) - Member
  • Swagatam Das (ISI Kolkata) - Member