Dr. Nick Pears

Introduction 

My main research interests are in Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. In addition to the projects that are described below, I am open to PhD project suggestions in any area of Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, and I am interested in expanding into areas of vision that involve learning and biologically inspired vision systems.

Computer Vision for Robot Navigation

Recent work has focused on how to find and segment the ground plane in a mobile robot's field of view, i.e., which parts of the visible scene can the robot drive over and which parts must it avoid and treat as obstacles. We have found a way of doing this with an uncalibrated camera. Furthermore we have found a way of measuring the height of obstacles above the ground, again with an uncalibrated camera. This allows us to determine whether obstacles are small enough to be driven over or high enough to be driven under. Further work shall focus on how to visually localise a mobile robot in it's environment while simultaneously building a map.

Computer Vision to Enhance Safety of Civil Aircraft Movements

In this project, we are looking to apply techniques to enhance the safety of civil aircraft as they move around on runways and taxiways, by highlighting potential obstacles on a pilot's head-up display. We also wish to consider the safety implications of using Computer Vision systems in such application, by working closely with the Department's High Integrity System's Engineering research group.

Computer Vision for Device Interaction

The aim of this project is to facilitate interactions between two devices, which we call the "client", such as a mobile phone or personal digital assistant (PDA), and the "server", such as a personal computer (PC), or computer controlled public display. An interaction in its simplest form might be the copying of some data in a file from the server to the client or vice versa. The way such interactions are controlled in current systems is usually via custom on-screen menu systems on the server. Other mechanisms include PDA cradles, where one can press a button on the PDA, when in its cradle, to initiate a copy of any data changes from the client to the server. This conventional approach is rather limited, cumbersome and inflexible. Our approach requires a camera on the client to view the display on the server, such that either the client or the server (or both) can compute exactly which part of the server display is being viewed, using techniques from image processing and computer vision. In addition, either the client or the server (or both) can compute the six degree-of-freedom (6 DOF) position of the client camera with respect to the server display, so that we have a "flying mouse". This basic principle will support a very broad range of interactions (depending on the context in which the system is operating) and it will make these interactions significantly quicker, easier and more intuitive for the user to initiate and control.

Face Recognition: 2-D and 3-D Techniques

We are running a face recognition project which has extended many of the current ideas in 2-D face recognition into 3-D face recognition. 3-D faces are captured using a special 3-D camera that uses a stereo pair of cameras and a projector that projects light onto the subject's face. A 3-D mesh can be generated from the image pair data and a standard 2-D image overlayed as a texture map. We are looking for the most discriminating feature space using Linear Discriminant Analysis on a large array of image processing and feature extraction techniques. Also, we plan to develop novel ways of representing the 3-D face, which suggest a completely new of implementing 3-D face recognition.

3-D Camera Development: AMADEUS FAR

Associated with the Department's AMADEUS project, we are developing a standalone face recognition unit, which encapsulates 3-D camera and face recognition hardware/software in a small, low-power package. The AMADEUS project aims to develop "architectures, machines and devices for efficient ubiquitous systems". In this context, we would like to develop a face recognition unit that can be deployed easily in any home or work space where user authentication may be required.

AMADEUS Videoware 

Again, in the context of small, low-power stand-alone devices, we would like to build a general purpose architecture on which to implement a wide array of real-time computer vision algorithms. The kind of applications we are thinking about include visually driven interaction with devices in the home (TV, cooker, fridge, etc.), security and surveillance, care of the elderly and so on. We plan to prototype our architectures using FPGA (field programmable gate array) technologies.