Research interests

• My research interests are in image processing and computer vision.
• I have helped to develop new techniques for static and moving shape extraction (both parametric and non-parametric) which have found application in automatic face and automatic gait recognition and in medical image analysis.

Current research

Our research is driven by society’s need to identify people from images of them. Our main research has been to pioneer:

1. gait as a biometric (to recognise subjects by the way they walk);

2. the ear as a biometric (for recognition by the ears’ shape and structure);

3. soft biometrics for identification (to recognise people from verbal descriptions of their body, face and or clothing).

Gait was uniquely pioneered at Southampton, as was soft biometrics for idemtification. For Ears we were not the first paper, but we were the first journal paper [325].

For gait we wrote the first paper (AVBPA 1997) [254] , first journal paper [313], co-authored the first book (Springer 2005) [5], the first survey of gait biometrics (Proc. of the IEEE) [340], a book chapter in the first book on biometrics (Springer 1997) [14], the first workshop/ sessions on gait biometrics; the first journal special edition on gait (IEEE SMC(B) 2010), the first keynote on gait biometrics (IEEE AFG 2004, Korea). These factors have been repeated (largely) for ear and for soft biometrics. I am currently co-authoring the first book on soft biometrics, we wrote the first paper (IEEE BTAS 2008) [153], first journal paper [313], co-authoring the first book (Wiley, under contract with A. Ross), the first survey of soft biometrics (Pattern Recog. Lett) [365], a first book chapter [24], the first workshop/ sessions on gait biometrics (ECCV); the first keynote on soft biometrics for identification (IEEE AVSS 2013).

We are currently working on mechanisms that seek to cross the semantic gap: to learn human descriptions from computer vision features and conversely to learn image features from human descriptions. In this way we shall seek to retrieve subjects from image databases by using fine-grained human attributes. We anticipate greater practical capability as well as performance advantage in this new approach. As such, we have recently described our work on fusion of soft biometrics in a psychology journal [372], for it leads not only to identification and search for subjects in video material, but also to new insight into eyewitness procedures, which are of continuing interest.

In parallel work, we are developing a new approach to analyse acceleration in image sequences [221]. I noticed that most approaches to analysing velocity actually subsume many types of motion. By separating out acceleration we have found new capability e.g. rotational acceleration to find a walking subject’s feet, as well as new capability to detect violent actions since acceleration is innate to such acts.

Our most recent work has aimed to capitalise on and to build on our new approaches to recognising people using human descriptions [361, 362, 365] : soft biometrics for identification. In the past three years we have described how we can recognise subjects by human descriptions (attributes) of their body [206, 212, 216, 218, 219,368] of their face [217, 220]and of their clothing [207, 209, 212, 369] . We are the first to achieve this for the human body and for clothing; the contemporary work in face recognition uses categorical attributes, which do not have the power of our new comparative approaches. In our work in the previous three years we have now used crowdsourcing to generate human descriptions, allowing for much greater and more international labels allowing greater study of their perspicacity.

I'm the Professor in Computer Vision at the School of Electronics and Computer Science. My research interests are in image processing and computer vision. I have helped to develop new techniques for static and moving shape extraction (both parametric and non-parametric) which have found application in automatic face and automatic  gait  recognition and in medical image analysis. We were early workers in face recognition, later came to pioneer gait  recognition and later joined the pioneers of ear biometrics, and currently we're working on soft biometrics where we recognise people by human attributes. Amongst previous research contracts, I was Principal Investigator with John Carter on the DARPA supported project Automatic Gait Recognition for Human ID at a Distance, on the General Dynamics Defence Technology Centre's program on data fusion (biometrics, naturally), on the MoD/ARL (US) IBM-led Information Technology Alliance and projects supporteed by the EPSRC, NERC, and the EU.

I am a Fellow of the IET, Fellow of the IAPR (for services to biometrics and computer vision) and am the Distinguished Fellow of the BMVA 2015 award. Amongst professional tasks I was previously chair of the IAPR Fellows Committee, the President of the IEEE Biometrics Council and Vice Chair IEEE PSPB.

I chaired the British Machine Vision Conference BMVC'98 held at Southampton in September '98 for the the British Machine Vision Association. Apart from being a programme member/ reviewer for other conferences, Josef Kittler and I chaired IAPR International Conference Audio Visual Biometric Person Authentication (AVBPA 2003) and was Publications Chair for the International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR 2004) at Cambridge UK with Josef Kittler, I co-chaired the  IEEE 7th International Conference on Face and Gesture Recognition FG2006 held at Southampton, UK in 2006. More recently I have been program co-chair at many of the top biometrics conferences (IEEE BTAS, IEEE/IAPR IJCB, IAPR ICB) and general chair BTAS 2010, ISBA 2016 (Japan), IJCB 2017 (USA), and track chair ICPR 2016 (Mexico). MIUA came to Southampton in 2018 and then it was time for Crete (excellent!)  it's  ICB 2019

I've written a heck of a lot of papers and supervised a heck of a lot of (great) PhD students. As I enter retirement, I'm writing books. These include:

• Our vision book is Feature Extraction and Image Processing for Computer Vision and is currently in its Fourth Edition, published by Academic Press/ Elsevier in 2019.
• My newest book is on the Fourier transform D'oh! Fourier, and should be published by World Science Press 2021.
• With Tieniu Tan and Rama Chellappa, I wrote Human ID based on Gait published 2005.

Prizes