Taking on the CVSSP Challenge
Wednesday 22 February 2012
On becoming Director of the Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing, Prof Adrian Hilton reflects on the achievements of the Centre over the past 25 years under the direction of his predecessor, Prof Josef Kittler and looks forward to the challenges ahead and the continued success of CVSSP.
As of January 2012 I have accepted the challenge of leading CVSSP, one of the UK's largest and most successful research activities in computer vision, speech and signal processing.
Since the foundation of CVSSP in 1986 the research activity has been led by Prof Josef Kittler building an international reputation for research in Pattern Recognition. Over the past 25 years the research activity has grown year-on-year building on core strengths in signal and image processing to investigate new applications domains. A characteristic of the Centre's research has always been the combination of generic theoretical advances with practical application to specific problem domains often in collaboration with industry. This combination of fundamental and applied research has attracted considerable support from industry and funding agencies allowing the Centre to grow in size and reputation. Highlights along the way have been the numerous prizes and honours received by CVSSP research teams and individuals, including Josef's election as a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering 2000 and BMVA Distinguished Fellow 2002, his award of the prestigious Pattern Recognition society K S Fu Prize 2006 for outstanding contributions to pattern recognition and IET Faraday Medal in 2008. The centre's achievements are also marked by several spin-out companies OmniPerception, Imagineer, AvatarMe as well as numerous examples of technology transfer through licensing and direct collaboration. CVSSP PhD and post-doctoral researchers have gone onto careers in leading academic institutions and major international companies (BBC, Disney, Microsoft, Sony, Mitsubishi, Sharp to name just a few) as well as technology startups and SME's.
In 2010 the iLab Multimedia Communications research group joined CVSSP bringing expertise in communication systems together with audio-visual signal processing to complement existing CVSSP activities. This has increased the centre to over 100 researchers with an expectation for further growth as recent academic appointments establish new research directions. Following iLab's lead the centre has also recently restructured into a set of six labs representing critical mass research activities within the centre. CVSSP has become one of the largest and highest profile research activities not just in the UK but internationally.
It is to this background that I take over the challenge of leading CVSSP with the aim of continuing to support excellent research together within a friendly, supportive and dynamic environment. One of the great things about research in such as active field is the continuous advances and new challenges with which we are presented. I hope you will all support the continued success of CVSSP in the same way that CVSSP's current standing is based on the contributions of researchers past and present.
Adrian Hilton
Director, CVSSP