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Chris Taylor
University of Manchester
Membership Number: 29
Address: Imaging Science and Biomedical Engineering, Stopford Building, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PT, UK
Email: Chris.Taylor@man.ac.uk
Phone: +44 161 275 5130
Fax: +44 161 275 5145
URL:

Biographical Sketch
Prof. Taylor obtained a BSc in Physics and PhD at the University of Manchester. He has been Director of the Wolfson Image Analysis Unit of the department of Medical Biophysics (now ISBE) at the University of Manchester since 1980 and full Professor since 1990. He is chairman of the British Machine Vision Association and sits of numerous national research strategy committees (Foresight ITEC Panel, Foresight Health and Life Sciences Panel, chair of Foresight Health Informatics Working Party). He is on the editorial board of the journal Medical Image Analysis and chair of the UK Institute for Health Informatics and the North of England Institute for Health Informatics. He has attracted over 10M euro in public and industrial research income and published over 200 articles in peer reviewed journals and conferences.

University of Manchester (Division of Imaging Science & Biomedical Engineering)
ISBE is the Image and Signal Computing research group of the Division of Imaging Science and Biomedical Engineering (ISBE) at the University of Manchester in England. This multi-disciplinary research group draws on knowledge from physics, mathematics, computing, bioscience and clinical medicine to develop new ideas and methods with applications in health, industry and commerce. The research of the group involves applying computer modelling and pattern recognition techniques to the analysis and interpretation of a wide range of images and signals. The Image and Signal Computing research group of ISBE was originally set up in 1977 as the Wolfson Image Analysis Unit and is one of the longest established computer vision groups in the UK. It has been at the forefront of development of many developments in image analysis including automated chromosome analysis, active shape models, active appearance models, mammographic prompting, visual inspection of printed circuit boards, and neuro-imaging. It was rated 5 (out of 5) in the last research assessment (RAE 96). It has secured extensive research council funding, from both the biological sciences and engineering and physical sciences council, totalling about 2 million Euro per year. The group presently encompasses over 50 staff and students, including 20 involved in image analysis. The group is run by Professor Chris Taylor who holds joint appointments in the Departments of Medical Biophysics and Computer Science and has been involved in machine vision research for 30 years. Current activities include computer vision, medical image analysis, face recognition, industrial inspection and signal interpretation in critical care. In recent years there has been significant progress in the automatic interpretation of images of human faces. The applications of such techniques includes: access control, behaviour monitoring, expression recognition, image enhancement, synthesis, database indexing, and many others. Existing techniques tend to address each of these areas individually, producing highly specific solutions to well-constrained problems. The aim of the Faces work is to develop a generic approach to all these applications, providing a single, unified system capable of performing any face interpretation task in a wide range of circumstances, from high-resolution stills to low-resolution and noisy video images.

The group has an active faces group led by Prof. Chris Taylor and comprises one research fellow, two research assistants and 2 PhD students. The group has developed generic shape modelling techniques suitable for human faces. The group has been awarded best paper prizes for its work in facial modelling at both Face and Gesture (Japan, April 1998) and the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV, Germany, June 1998).

Currently ISBE is involved in the EU UFACE project (User friendly access control systems for financial and healthcare applications) which aims to develop and demonstrate user friendly secure access control in physical access control healthcare. This will be done by combining a facial biometric with a smart-card to create a personalised token which will be integrated into the emerging biometric interface standards.

Via its technology transfer company, Visual Automation Ltd, it is also involved in the IST training project PCCV (performance characterisation of computer vision techniques June 2000- Sept 2002). This project includes activities to collate information on and to distribute data sets of use in testing, assessing and validating computer system methods for specific applications and application classes. Another related project is in behaviour analysis of laboratory animals (Characterising Behavioural Phenotypes Using Automated Image Analysis), in particular rats and mice. The aim is to be able to detect and recognise specific behaviours in solo and paired animals. This is nationally funded (1999-2002) and is in collaboration with a pharmaceutical company


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