Research Interests

My research focuses on human visual perception including changes in vision associated with ageing and expertise. I am also interested in the applications of visual perception computer vision and robotics.

My main focus is on the perception of visual texture (second-order vision) and how this enables humans to distinguish between changes in illumination from changes in the material properties of surfaces. This is combined with an interest in shape-from-shading, the role of shadows in object perception, and depth perception.

Older adults find it harder to see visual texture than younger adults and this may lead to difficulty in judging the shape of uneven surfaces such as steps. Here I am interested in how step markings might be manipulated to influence toe clearance in older adults.

With regard to expertise, along with my PhD student Emil Skog and colleagues at the Ordnance Survey I have studied stereopsis in remote sensing surveyors who use stereoscopic aerial images to make and modify maps. We found that they make more use of stereoscopic (3D) vision than do untrained individuals.

In Computer Vision the same mechanisms that we think are used by humans to separate illumination and material changes can be used by machines for the same purpose (intrinsic image extraction). Here I am also interested on how human edge and surface processing can be modelled with machine learning and deep neural networks to aid in the reconstruction of 3D shape from 2D images.