Mobile speech and data communications have become part of everyday life in all parts of the world. However, the provision of more sophisticated ‘tele-presence’ services requires a further quantum leap in research if we are to move forward from mobile phone technology. The Communications Group plays a key role in researching and advancing the necessary enabling technologies to facilitate this quantum leap, including the physical network and service layers, as well as their joint optimisation.
The CSPC research in image processing and computer vision spans techniques from preprocessing, to feature extraction (especially moving ones) and on to image analysis. Our approaches to feature extraction have extended classic technique, such as active contours/ level sets and the Hough transform, and we have started totally new approaches. The new approaches have been phrased around using analogies such as water, heat and light. These analogies simplify the problems and enable alternative methods of feature extraction. Our main application areas have been in biometrics, in remote sensing and in medical image analysis. We have a long record in biometrics, starting in automatic face recognition and have since conducted some of the earliest work in recognising people by their gait and by their ears. We continue to work in these areas and are now developing soft biometrics, in which we learn from human labelling to augment or even replace the automatically derived measures.
We consider exact and approximate fitting of data by models. The problems are posed in the behavioral setting, i.e., the models are viewed as sets of outcomes and are not a priori bound to particular representations. This formulation gives freedom in the choice of the most suitable representation for a particular purpose.
Our work on fundamental theory, includes behavioural approaches to system theory; system identification particularly using structured low-rank approximations; multidimensional systems theory; robust nonlinear control; iterative learning control; adaptive control and flow control. We use a variety of techniques from linear algebra, functional analysis, partial differential equations and commutative algebra.
Our work on fundamental theory, includes behavioural approaches to system theory; system identification particularly using structured low-rank approximations; multidimensional systems theory; robust nonlinear control; iterative learning control; adaptive control and flow control. We use a variety of techniques from linear algebra, functional analysis, partial differential equations and commutative algebra.
