I am Professor of Visual Computation at Queen Mary College, University of London; elected a Fellow of the Institution of Electrical Engineers and a member of the UK Computing Research Committee (UKCRC). My early interest was in information theory & measurement and received a B.Sc. from the University of Electronic Sciences and Technology of China in 1985. My B.Sc. thesis was on biomedical image analysis which gave me the opportunity to develop a wider interest in robotics.
This led me to pursue a doctorate in computer vision under Mike Brady at Keble College, Oxford in 1986. Mike introduced me to differential geometry in computer vision and the work of Ellen Hildreth at the MIT AI Lab on computing optic flow. During that time, I met David Murray who introduced me to the extensive work on structure from motion by David and Bernard Buxton at the GEC Hirst Centre. I received my D.Phil. from Oxford in 1989 with a thesis on the computation of optic flow using second-order geometrical analysis. A recipient of a Queen's Research Scientist Award in 1987, a Royal Society Research Fellow in 1987 and 1988, a GEC sponsored Oxford industrial fellow in 1989, I worked as a postdoctoral research fellow with Hilary Buxton on the EU ESPRIT-II project VIEWS (Visual Interpretation and Evaluation of Wide-area Scenes) in 1989-93. A number of discussions I had in 1990 with Chris Brown at Rochester and Ray Rimey at Lockheed Martin and a visit to Rochester in 1991 initiated my interest in variational graph models.
This led to my work on modelling visual behaviour patterns of action and activity based on object motion trajectories using visually augmented hidden Markov models and Bayesian belief networks. Since 1993 I have been working on modelling human faces, body dynamics, gestures and behaviour for human recognition, visually mediated interaction, communication and surveillance.
I have published over 200 papers in computer vision and machine learning, and a book on Dynamic Vision: From Images to Face Recognition with Stephen McKenna and Alexandra Psarrou. I joined the Department of Computer Science at Queen Mary University of London as a Lecturer in 1993 and was appointed as Professor of Visual Computation in 2001. During this time, I have established the Queen Mary Vision Laboratory and enjoyed immensely working with research students and postdoctoral researchers. I helped setting up and worked closely with Safehouse Technology (Clarity Visual Intelligence) in 1998-2004 for developing commercial computer vision systems.
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