When Takeo Kanade listened to a recent voice mail message, he couldn't believe his ears.

A call from the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia indicated he'd won the Bower Award and Prize for Achievement in Science. The prize is $250,000.

There surely is some mistake, he thought. "So I called the guy who called me and asked him, 'Are you sure?' " Dr. Kanade said.

But the institute in Philadelphia had the right guy. Carnegie Mellon University's U.A. and Helen Whitaker professor of computer science and robotics is this year's recipient of one of the world's richest awards for scientific achievement. The official announcement is expected today.

"This is a big honor," Dr. Kanade said, noting how his long-standing "intellectual adventure" at Carnegie Mellon "sometimes hits treasure."

The Bower Award and Prize is the newest of the many awards that the Franklin Institute has been bestowing upon the world's top men and women in science ever since 1826.

Franklin Institute laureates have included Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking.

The Bower Award and Prize each year focuses on one of seven areas of science. This year's focus was robotics and next year's is cosmology.

Dr. Kanade, 62, will receive the gold medal and prize during a black-tie ceremony April 17 in the rotunda of the institute's Benjamin Franklin National Memorial.

A pioneer in robotics, Dr. Kanade created the first complete face-recognition system and first direct-drive robotic arm, both of which are still in use decades later. Another creation, EyeVision, was used during broadcast of the 2001 Super Bowl in Tampa, Fla. It used 51 cameras plus computer software to provide viewers with "virtualized reality" of action from any angle.

He's been working on an autonomous helicopter but now serves as director of the newly created Quality of Life Technology Engineering Research Center -- a joint project of Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh that will develop robotic technology to help the elderly, ill and disabled.

For now, he's developing a camera that can look precisely where a person is looking and process the information to assist in everyday activities and chores.

The Quality of Life project "may be more lasting and have a bigger impact" than any other project he's been involved with, he said.

The native of Kyoto, Japan, received his doctoral degree in electrical engineering in 1974 from Kyoto University. In 1980, he joined Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute, where, as its director for 10 years, he started the world's first robotics doctoral program.

He's best known for his face-recognition software, which he continues perfecting with hopes it someday can single out an individual from millions of faces.

He also developed the system used in computer videos. Rather than download 100 percent of each frame of video, his method downloads only that portion of the frame that's changing. So a face in a video stream might change, but the wallpaper doesn't, so it is downloaded once and repeated in subsequent frames.

In a news release, Carnegie Mellon President Jared L. Cohon described Dr. Kanade as "one of Carnegie Mellon's treasures."

He said Dr. Kanade's research in computer vision and robotics has led to advances in medicine and robotic surgery and increased productivity in industry.