Prof Nixon of University of Southampton, UK

With the proliferation of surveillance cameras, society needs means to identify people from the images these cameras provide. Crime-solving websites are replete with imagery of criminals who are often disguised and/or at low resolution; terrorist attacks yield more imagery. We noticed this many years ago and were the first to develop systems that aimed to recognize people by their gait and their style of walking.
This talk will describe some of the earlier approaches and their motivation, together with the recent works on deep learning. More recently we have moved to recognize from human descriptions, consistent with eyewitness statements and the limited spatial and temporal resolution of surveillance imagery, and the chance of disguise. We have shown that human descriptions can be used for recognition and retrieval and formulated ways to make these descriptions more effective. We have so far used descriptions of the face, the body, and the clothing, and our current work shows how the labels can be derived by computer vision and explore the new information available by the interface between semantic description and automated recognition. This talk thus surveys these areas, describing progress in gait and in soft biometrics.

Biography:

Dr. Mark Nixon is a professor in computer vision at the school of Electronics and Computer Science of the University of Southampton, UK   His research interests are in image processing and computer vision  He has helped to develop new techniques for static and moving shape extraction (both parametric and non-parametric) which have found application in the automatic face and automatic gait recognition and in medical image analysis. His team members were early workers in face recognition, later came to pioneer gait recognition, and later joined the pioneers of ear biometrics.  Currently, the group is working on soft biometrics where people are recognized people by their human attributes. Earlier Dr. Nixon was the  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 supported by the EPSRC, NERC, and the EU.

Dr. Nixon is a Distinguished Fellow of the BMVA 2015, a Fellow of the IET, a Fellow of the IAPR (for services to biometrics and computer vision), and a Distinguished Speaker of the IEEE Biometrics Council.

He chaired the British Machine Vision Conference BMVC'98 held at Southampton in September '98 for the British Machine Vision Association. Apart from being a program member/ reviewer for other conferences, cochaired IAPR International Conference Audio Visual Biometric Person Authentication (AVBPA 2003) and was Co-Publications Chair for the International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR 2004) at Cambridge UK, and co-chaired the  IEEE 7th International Conference on Face and Gesture Recognition FG2006 held at Southampton, the UK in 2006. Recently he has been program co-chair at many biometrics conferences of IEEE BTAS, IEEE/IAPR IJCB, IAPR ICB and general chair BTAS 2010, ISBA 2016 (Japan), IJCB 2017 (USA), and track chair ICPR 2016 (Mexico). He also chaired MIUA at Southampton in 2018 and then  ICB 2019 in Crete.

Dr. Nixon and his team's work has been presented and published at BTAS 2016 and at Biosig 2017. He presented his gait and ear studies at IEEE Face and Gesture 2004, EUSIPCO 2004, IEEE ISBAST 2008, the International Conference on Information Security and Digital Forensics, on Biometrics and Forensics, at IEEE BTAS 2009, and on Semantic Biometrics at IEEE BiDS 2009, at  IEEE International Joint Conference on Biometrics (the USA, 2011)  and at the 15th Sanken International Symposium (Japan, 2012) and on gait and soft Biometrics at IEEE AVSS 2013.  His biometrics work was covered on  ABC (Good Morning America) News, on BBC 40 Years of Surveillance, and later on, BBC1  Bang Goes the Theory, and recently on a murder in Australia 60 Minutes Australia. Gait spoofing was covered on Discovery's Planet Earth. There's been coverage on ear biometrics on ITV Meridian, 2010, (gait) and on BBC1 in Newsround. 

Address:Southampton, United Kingdom