Vision and AI: then, now and tomorrow

Computer vision broke away from AI as a field in its own right in the 1960’s. As a fundamental human sense “vision” is something we take for granted, but the power of human visual ability lies in the fact that it is implicitly tied to our knowledge of the world and our ability to reason. Computer vision is now a huge field, with major investment from industry. Who could have foreseen that every one of us would carry at least one device with a camera all the time. For many tasks, machine vision can surpass human performance but these areas tend to be quite specific in domain. We don’t yet have a generic visual machine that can adapt to new tasks t

he way a human can, and yet we are expecting SAE level 5 fully autonomous vehicles to be on our roads within the next 10 years.

This talk tries to summarise the field as it has developed. It will look at two ongoing research problems at Surrey, that of sign language translation and autonomous vehicles. Where we are now and what problems remain to be solved. In the context of the field we will discuss the shortcomings of current AI and what work needs to be done to truly achieve human performance.

Richard Bowden is Professor of Computer Vision and Machine Learning at the University of Surrey where he leads the Cognitive Vision Group within CVSSP and is Associate Dean for postgraduate research within his faculty. His research centres on the use of computer vision to locate, track, understand and learn from humans. He has held over 40 research grants from UK, EU funding bodies as well as industrial funded projects. These projects cover areas such as cognitive robotics and vision, sign and gesture recognition, lip-reading and nonverbal communication as well as many fundamental topics to computer vision such as tracking and detection. His research has been recognised by prizes, plenary talks and media/press coverage including the Sullivan thesis prize in 2000 and many best paper awards.

To date, he has published over 190 peer reviewed publications and has served as either program committee member or area chair for ICCV, CVPR, ECCV, BMVA, FG and ICPR in addition to numerous international workshops and conferences. He is an Associate Editor for the journals Image and Vision Computing and IEEE Trans Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (the top journal in his field). He was awarded a Royal Society Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowship in 2013 and is a member of the RS international exchanges committee. He was a member of the British Machine Vision Association (BMVA) executive committee and a company director for seven years. He is a member of the BMVA, a senior member of the IEEE and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. He was awarded a prestigious Fellowship of the International Association of Pattern Recognition in 2016.

The 1hr seminar will be followed by a drinks reception.