Professor Fred StentifordElectronic and Electrical Engineering
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Torrington Place London WC1E 7JE |
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+44 (0) 1394 411469 |
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+44 (0) 7761 828300 |
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+44 (0) 1394 411469 |
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Issues in Pattern RecognitionPattern Recognition is in a crisis. Performance in recent years has been attributable only to increasing computer power and knowledge about specific applications. Serious questions lie in the following tricky areas:
The critical and essential element of any recognition system is the ability to make use of what structure is in common between two patterns. Classes of patterns are formed by those groups of patterns which all possess some common structure with others in the group. The structures in common may not be the same throughout the group, but there will be sufficient commonality to characterise the strength of membership of the group. Intuition does not seem to be sufficient to identify such structures, but they are "clearly" present. We are sometimes misled by our own senses. Our vision tells us what is important around us for our own survival. We then believe that these attentive features are essential parts of any mechanised pattern recognition system. However, the human vision recognises salient objects that we have never seen before not by features, but by detecting commonality across the background and against what we have seen before. Whatever is left is salient. We cannot use features to recognise something we have never seen before. This same mechanism therefore can be used for both detecting saliency and recognition itself. |
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Modeling and Measurement of Visual Attention Much research has been carried out into mechanisms of attention in the human visual system. Some of these models may provide solutions to problems of the machine interpretation of images and the intuitive access to databases containing visual material. |
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Focusing Focusing and visual accommodation is very much related to attention. Experiments have shown that when global attention measures are maximised across focal planes, the principal subject becomes in focus. |
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I studied mathematics at St Catharine's College, Cambridge, and obtained a PhD in Pattern Recognition at Southampton University. I first joined the Plessey Company to work on various applications including the recognition of fingerprints and patterns in time varying magnetic fields. I then joined BT and carried out research on optical character recognition and speech recognition. After that I led a team developing systems employing pattern recognition methods for the machine translation of text and speech. This work led to the world's first demonstration of automatic translation of speech between different languages.
I then moved into designing dialogues for new telephone services and managed the government funded collaborative Dialogues 2000 project which aimed to research and promote common standards in the spoken user interface in UK industry. The membership of over 200 companies was a measure of its success.
I returned to vision research to lead a group developing new algorithms for analysing and delivering multimedia content and more recently joined UCL to pursue this research more intensively.
I am a corporate member of the IEE and the BCS.
I look after the Boyton village website.
My current interests are in the field of Pattern Recognition and Machine Vision. I have an open mind on the usefulness of mathematical theory in this area of research preferring to rely upon experiment to determine the direction that investigation should take. I have a special interest in evolution and why it works.
Specific topics of interest include:
Visual attention
Similarity measures
Content-Based Image Retrieval
HCI
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