Nobuyuki Otsu (大津 展之) graduated from the Department of Mathematical Engineering at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Tokyo in 1969, completed a master's course in mathematics at the Department of Mathematical Engineering and Information Physics of the University of Tokyo in 1971, and obtained a Doctor of Engineering from the University of Tokyo in 1981.^[1] He joined the Electrotechnical Laboratory (ETL) in 1971, where he engaged in research on pattern recognition theory and its applications. Over the course of his career, he served as a Visiting Researcher at the Canada National Research Council, Director of the Mathematical Information Laboratory at the Software Division, and Director of the Information Science Laboratory at the Information Science Division. He became Chief Senior Researcher in 1990 and Director of the Machine Understanding Division in 1991.^[1,2] In addition, he held adjunct professorships at two universities, serving as a professor at the Cooperative Graduate School at the University of Tsukuba from 1992 to 2010, and as a professor at the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology at the University of Tokyo from 2001 to 2007. He retired from the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in 2012 and was awarded the title of Emeritus Researcher.^[1]

Otsu has engaged in fundamental mathematical research and its applications concerning pattern recognition, image processing, multivariate analysis, artificial intelligence, and neurocomputing. Otsu's method, an image binarization technique he developed, remains a standard technique widely used both in Japan and abroad. He has made significant contributions to foundational research on principles of human soft intelligence (information processing)—such as recognition, understanding, reasoning, and learning—as well as applications of "soft information processing (intelligent information processing) methods." In the Real World Computing (RWC) Project, a 10-year national project sponsored by MITI from 1992 to 2001, he promoted the research and development of "real world intelligence" and established fundamentals to exploit new application fields in intelligent information processing and multimedia information processing.

In 1978, he received the Electronic Communication Academic Meeting Incentive Award of Art and Science for "Threshold determination method from concentration distribution". In 1988, he won the Behavior Metrology Meeting Prize from an Academic Society Excellent Prize for achievements regarding the "building of unifying basic theory by nonlinear extension of a multivariate analysis/multivariate analyses both hands way" across a series of theses. In 1998, he was awarded the IAPR-sponsored MVA'98 Most Influential Paper of the Decade Award for "A New Scheme for Practical Flexible and Intelligent Vision Systems". In 2002, he received the Institute of Image Information and Television Engineers Niwa Takayanagi Prize Achievement Prize for promoting the research and development of "The real world intelligence technology".