Dr. Barney Smith's research is in image processing and pattern recognition. Her primary focus is on document image analysis. Her doctoral work focused on modeling and understanding document image degradations to improvce document image analysis and recognition. For this work she earned an NSF CAREER award. She also does research on biomedical image processing, remote sensing and astronomical image processing.

From 1989 to 1993 Dr. Barney Smith worked as an engineer at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in New London, CT. In 1993, she had a research internship at the NATO SACLANT Centre in LaSpezia, Italy. Her work at both NUWC and SACLANT Centre involved designing automatic target classification algorithms and systems that utilize passive acoustic data.

Her sabbatical during the 2007-2008 academic year was spent primarily at Universität des Saarlandes (Saarland University) in Germany. In summer 2009 she will be a visiting professor at LORIA and the University of Nancy, France.

Dr. Elisa Barney Smith joined the faculty at Boise State University in August 1999. Her previous academic experience includes being an adjunct faculty in the Computer Science Department at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Plattsburgh for the Spring of 1999 and at the Thames Valley State Technical College (now Three Rivers State Technical College) in Norwich, CT from 1992 to 1993. Dr. Barney Smith also earned secondary (7-12) teaching certification in Math and Physics for the State of New York.

Dr. Barney Smith is a member of IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) and SPIE (Society of Photo-optical Instrumentation Engineers), and was chair of the Boise section of IEEE from 2000-2003.