Professor Mark S Nixon

I'm the Professor in Computer Vision in the ISIS research group at the Department 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 more recently joined the pioneers of ear biometrics. 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. Currently, we're on General Dynamics Defence Technology Centre's program on data fusion (biometrics, naturally). Now I'm on the MoD/ARL (US) IBM-led Information Technology Alliance, in the sensors theme. Surprisingly perhaps, I was labelled as a star Computer Scientist in a recent review (I've been part of the top-rated Electronics side since I've worked here).

I chaired the 9^th British Machine Vision Conference BMVC'98 held at Southampton in September '98 (an issue of Image and Vision Computing containing some of the most highly rated conference papers was published as Volume 18 Number 9). The BMVC'98 Electronic Conference Proceedings remain online via the British Machine Vision Association. Apart from being a programme member/ reviewer for other conferences, Josef Kittler and I chaired a BMVA meeting on Advancing Biometric Technologies. and we later co-chaired the IAPR International Conference Audio Visual Biometric Person Authentication (AVBPA 2003) at Surrey. I co-chaired the BMVA meeting on Spatiotemporal Image Processing with Adrian Hilton, as well as 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. Next, I'm program chair at BTAS 2008 and at ICB 2009.

If you'd like to hear about our research in automatic gait recognition, I gave plenaries/ keynotes at at IEEE Face and Gesture 2004, EUSIPCO 2004 and at ISVC 2006, and ISBAST 2008. Next, I’ll be talking at the Biometrics Summer School in Cagliari..

My first book, Introductory Digital Design - a programmable approach, was published by MacMillan, UK, July 1995. Our vision book, co-written with Dr. Alberto Aguado from the University of Surrey, entitled Feature Extraction and Image Processing is currently in its Second Edition, published by Academic Press/ Elsevier in 2007. With Tieniu Tan and Rama Chellappa, we've just finished a new book Human ID based on Gait which is part of the New Springer Series on Biometrics, and was published late 2005.

Our work on biometrics has attracted quite a lot of press interest. Here we are on BBC1, Aug 2005 (ears), on ABC (Good Morning America) News (gait), on BBC now on YouTube, Sky News 2006 (gait). Even better, there's an article in the Times and even a leading article. Here's a BBC report on our work on automatic gait recognition

If you'd like to see us on a Real Player movie from BBC: Automatic gait recognition