Welcome to Nicholas Dowson's homepage at the University of Surrey

I joined the Centre for Vision Speech and Signal Processing (CVSSP) under the supervision of Richard Bowden in 2003. I hope to be complete by September 2006.

My PhD work is in the field of Computer Vision, specialising in two main areas:

• Tracking image patches through video sequences as they change in appearance.
• Using Mutual Information is a measure of similarity between two images patches.

One of the main outputs of this work is warthog: short for (WA)rp (R)eference to (T)emplate f(h)or (O)ptimal (G)raphic. This is a matlab module which aligns a template to a reference image by min/maximising a similarity function. You can download it from the Downloads section.

The module is fast and supports many options, including:

• 6 similarity functions (Sum of Square Differences, Normalised Correlation, standard MI, Post-Parzen MI, In-Parzen MI, and Partial Volume Estimated MI)
• 4 warp functions (Translation, Rotation, Similarity and Affine)
• 5 optimisation methods (including Powell and Levenberg Marquardt). Analytic derivatives are available for all the above functions.

Acknowledgements

This work would not have been possible without financial assistance in the form of a grant from the CVSSP, and an ORS Scholarship for the Department of Trade and Skills, UK.

You can email me at:

Updated: 6 July 2006.

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