UK Industrial Vision Research Institutions

General area of work covered: Imaging, classification and machine vision

Fionn Murtagh worked on imaging and data analysis aspects of the Hubble Space Telescope for 12 years with the European Space Agency. He has organized a number of SPIE (optical engineering) events. He maintains web sites with software on multiresolution image and signal processing at www.multiresolution.com and www.multiresolution.tv and on multivariate data analysis at astro.u-strasbg.fr/~fmurtagh/mda-sw

Copies of two books are online at: www.multiresolution.com/cupbook.html

1) JL Starck, F Murtagh and A Bijaoui, Image Processing and Data Analysis: The Multiscale Approach, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

2) And the first, 2002, edition of: JL Starck and F Murtagh, Astronomical Image and Data Analysis, Springer, 2006 (2nd edn.).

Recent papers have dealt with wavelet and curvelet moments for image classification, with application to aggregate mixture grading; inpainting and zooming in images using sparse representations; the theory and practice of wavelets – e.g. the undecimated wavelet decomposition and its reconstruction; and Bayesian inference for multiband image segmentation via model-based cluster trees.

Roy Davies has spent much of his career on real-time implementations of vision, initially on fast hardware, and latterly on efficient software employing sampling and other techniques. A recently published paper [1] covers industrially important thresholding techniques; the Food Faraday Partnership recently included a specially prepared case study summarising his latest findings [2]. Roy’s website includes a breakdown of his research under five main headings – image filtering, feature detection, intermediate level analysis, real-time operation, and automated visual inspection. Roy’s two books on vision [3, 4] are authoritative and widely used by practitioners in industry.

1) E.R. Davies, Stable bi-level and multi-level thresholding of images using a new global transformation, IET Computer Vision, 2, no. 2, 60–74 (2008).

2) E.R. Davies, Inspection in the food industry – Matching the machine to the line may not be so trivial, Case Study in Food Sensors Network News, Issue 2, Spring 2008.

3) E.R. Davies, Image Processing for the Food Industry. World Scientific, Singapore (2000).

4) E.R. Davies, Machine Vision: Theory, Algorithms, Practicalities. Morgan Kaufmann (3rd edition, 2005).

Both Departments have PhD courses in this area.