August 2017

We are a team of researchers, led by Dr. Xianghua Xie at the Department of Computer Science in Swansea University, working on both low level and high level Computer Vision problems and their applications to Medicine, Biology and Engineering. We have strong research interests in medical image analysis, image segmentation, image registration, 3D pose estimation and tracking, object recognition, real time processing, texture analysis, inspection, and machine learning. We are also expanding our research on big data and mining. We are welcoming talented, motivated people to join us to pursue research in the field of Computer Vision and Medical Image Understanding, and we are actively seeking collaborative opportunities across disciplines.


Research Opportunities

  • PhD in Computer Vision and Medical Image Analysis.
  • MSc by Research in Visual Computing - one year research only master programme.
  • MRes in Visual Computing - one year research focused master programme (1/3 taught modules and 2/3 research project).

Noteworthy

Oct 2017 - Warm welcome to Mr. Michael Kenning, who is now studying MRes on the topic of deep learning in irregular domain. Michael obtained his first degree in Computer Science with honour from University of Bath.

Feb 2017 - Our recent work on novel deep learning techniques for face detection in the wild has been accepted by IEEE Face & Gesture. A preprint copy can be found here. See our publication page to find out more related work.

Oct 2016 - We welcome back Mr. Gavin Tsang, who is now studying PhD on the topic of Data Mining and Machine Learning for Health Informatics. Gavin is based in Computer Science but the project is a collaboration with College of Medicine.

Oct 2016 - Warm welcome to Mr. Paul Stroe, who is studying MSc by Research on Medical Image Analysis using Machine Learning. Paul obtained his first degree in Computer Science from University of Birmingham.

July 2016 - For the third time, we are hosting the BMVA Computer Vision Summer School this July. This is the 21st edition and CVSS is the longest running summer school in the field. This year's event features 16 speakers from both academia and industry, e.g. Microsoft.

May 2016 - Grant Capture: Data Release - Trust, Identity, Privacy and Security, funded by EPSRC. Dr. Xie is a CI on this project, which is a collaboration between Portsmouth Institute of Criminal Justice Studies and Swansea Computer Science. The project is concerned with the close integration of formal modelling, data mining, visual analytics and information security management in order to predict the impact of releasing public data sets that are essential to commercial functions and economy. Total FEC funding: £1.6M, 1 June 2016 - 30 November 2019. EP/N028139/1 (Swansea), EP/N027825/1 (Portsmouth).

Dec 2015 - We are pleased to announce that CONVERSE dataset is publicly available. CONVERSE is a human interaction recognition dataset intended for the exploration of classifying naturally executed conversational scenarios between a pair of individuals via the use of pose- and appearance-based features. A in-depth survey of the current state of publicly available datasets to the action recognition community highlights several key layers in human action, from single person actions to multi-person interactions. Current depth-based datasets describe actions or interactions in which classes are often represented by a series of key poses which are readily identified in depth-based representations (i.e. kicks and punches). The motivation behind CONVERSE is to present the problem of classifying subtle and complex behaviours between participants with pose-based information, classes which are not easily defined by the poses they contain. Go to CONVERSE Page...

Jun 2015 - Congratulations to H. Zhang and X. Xie, whose paper titled Divergence of Gradient Convolution: Deformable Segmentation with Arbitrary Initializations has been accepted for publication with IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (T-IP). See more publications...

Dec 2014 - J.-L. Jones, X. Xie, and E. Essa, Combining Region-based and Imprecise Boundary-based Cues for Interactive Medical Image Segmentation, International Journal for Numerical Methods in Biomedical Engineering, vol. 30, no. 12, pp. 1649–1666, 2014. See more publications...

September 2014 - The 26th British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC) will be hosted at Swansea University (Singleton campus), 7-10 September 2015. For more information, please click to visit the conference website and you can follow the conference on .

May 2014 - Congratulations to Ehab Essa who successfully defended his PhD viva with minor corrections. The thesis is titled "Combinatorial Optimisation for Arterial Image Segmentation".

Feb 2014 - S. Y. Yeo, X. Xie, I. Sazonov, and P. Nithiarasu, Segmentation of biomedical images using active contour model with robust image feature and shape prior, International Journal for Numerical Methods in Biomedical Engineering, vol. 30, no. 2, pp. 232–248, 2014. See more publications...

Jan 2014 - Welcome to Mr. Mike Edwards who started his PhD. Mike will be investigating novel techniques for the estimation of human pose and interactions from video sequences.

Oct 2013 - Welcome to Mr. Yaxi Ye who started his PhD. Yaxi will be investigating novel mobile computing techniques in order to improve the lives of those who suffer from neurodegenerative diseases.

Jun 2013 - R. Yang, M. Mirmehdi, X. Xie, and D. Hall, Shape and Appearance Priors for Level Set-based LV Segmentation, IET Journal of Computer Vision, vol. 7, no.3, pp. 170-183, 2013. See more publications...

Dec 2012 - R. Borgo et al., State of the Art Report on Video-based Graphics and Video Visualizations, Computer Graphics Forum, vol 31, no. 8, pages 2450 - 2477, 2012. See more publications...

Oct 2012, Welcome to Dr. Rhodri Bevan who joined the team as a post-doc Research Assistant. Rhodri's expertise is in computational modelling and he will be working on coronary disease modelling.

Oct 2012, Welcome to Mr. Robert Palmer who started his PhD in Medical Image Analysis. Robert obtained his BSc in Physics (Aber) and MSc in Medical Physics (Swansea).

Sep 2012 - E. Essa and X. Xie presented two papers in MICCAI Medical Computer Vision which are titled Shape Prior Model for Media-Adventitia Border Segmentation in IVUS using Graph Cut and Efficient Geometrical Potential Force Computation for Deformable Model Segmentation. See more publications...

Jul 2012 - X. Xie was invited to give a seminar in Brain Interface Computing at the Welsh Intelligent Polymer Processing Consortium for Functional Applications. His talk is entitled "Computer Vision for Biology and Medicine".

Jul 2012 - X. Xie was invited to deliver a keynote presentation at the 8th Conference on Articulated Motion and Deformable Objects. His keynote was titled "Deformable Model in Segmentation and Tracking". Unfortunately, due to unexpected VISA delay, the trip was cancelled. However, the slides are available to download from here, which were made available to delegates.

Mar 2012 - J. Chiverton, X. Xie, and M. Mirmehdi, Automatic Bootstrapping and Tracking of Object Contours, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (T-IP), volume 21, issue 3, pages 1231 - 1245, March 2012. See more publications...

Feb 2012 - X. Xie organised a special session on Shape Analysis and Deformable Modelling for the 1st International Conference on Pattern Recognition Applications and Methods.

Dec 2011, Warm welcome to Dr. Huaizhong Zhang who joined the team as a RIVIC Research Assistant. Previously, Huaizhong was a post-doc researcher at Dublin.

Nov 2011 - X. Xie was invited to give a seminar at Cardiff University. His talk is entitled "Medical Image Processing".

Oct 2011 - Grant Capture: Biomedical Research Unit: Advanced Medical Image Analysis and Visualisation, Collaborator, led by Prof. John (Bangor University), funded by NISCHR, £275K to Swansea (£1.2M in total), 2011 - 2014.

Oct 2011, Welcome to Mr. Jingjing Deng who started his MSc by Research. Jingjing will be working on human interaction modelling.

Sep 2011 - B. Daubney and X. Xie, Entropy Driven Hierarchical Search for 3D Human Pose Estimation, In Proceedings of the 22nd British Machine Vision Conference, September 2011. The video of oral presentation (acceptance rate 8%). can be found from here . See more publications...

May 2011 - S. Yeo, X. Xie, I. Sazonov and P. Nithiarasu, Geometrically Induced Force Interaction for Three-Dimensional Deformable Models, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (T-IP), volume 20, number 5, pages 1373 - 1387, IEEE CS Press, May 2011. See more publications...

Mar 2011 - Grant Capture: Non-Invasive Quantification of Complex Heart Valve Lesions: A model-based approach using 3D echocardiography, Co-investigator, led by Dr. van Lool(Swansea University), funded by NISCHR, £58K, 2011 - 2014.

Jul 2010, Welcome to Mr. Ehab Essa who started his PhD in IVUS image segmentation. Previously, Ehab was an Assistant Lecturer in Egypt. His PhD is jointly funded by Computer Science and Engineering.

May 2010, Welcome to Dr. Cyril Charron who started his postdoc at Swansea University.

Mar 2010 - Grant Capture: NISCHR Registered Research Group: Medical Image Analysis and Visualisation, Co-investigator, led by Prof. Zwiggelaar (Aber University), funded by NISCHR, £95K, 2010 - 2013.

Mar 2010 - Grant Capture: Patient Specific Multi-view Coronary Geometry and Computational Disease Modelling, Principal investigator, funded by WORD, £144K, 2010 - 2012.

Nov 2009 - X. Xie was invited to give a seminar at the University of Southampton. His talk is entitled "Implicit Methods for Segmentation and Tracking".

Jan 2010 - Xianghua Xie, Active Contouring Based on Gradient Vector Interaction and Constrained Level Set Diffusion, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (T-IP), volume 19, number 1, pages 154 - 164, IEEE CS Press, January 2010. See more publications...

September 2017 - Check out some interesting talks in this workshop we are organising: Deep Learning on Irregular Domains.

May 2017 - Many congratulations to Jingjing Deng who successfully defended his PhD thesis, titled "Adaptive Learning for Segmentation and Detection". The two external examiners are Prof. David Marshall from Cardiff University and Dr. Adrian Clark from Essex University. Dr. Deng has taken a postdoc position in the group, working on an EPSRC funded project on data mining.

Oct 2016 - Our warm welcome to Mr. Dafydd Ravenscroft, who is now studying MSc by Research with us. Daf will work on Robust Visual Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM). He will also be spending some time to wrap up his previous work on OCT for macular degeneration diagnosis.

Aug 2016 - Warm welcome to Mr. Ali Alqahtani, who is pursuing a PhD in Machine Learning and Visualisation.

Aug 2016 - Our warm welcome to Mr. Mohammed Ali, who is studying PhD in Scientific Visualisation. Mohammed's first supervisor is Prof. Mark Jones.

July 2016 - Congratulations to Dr. Robert Palmer! Robert successfully defended his PhD thesis on Automatic Deformable Modelling for 3D Medical Image Segmentation. We are looking forward to your graduation ceremony in February!

October 2015 - Congratulations to Jonathan Jones who successfully defended his PhD thesis on 2D and 3D Segmentation of Medical Images. Well done, Dr. Jones!

October 2015 - Welcome to Miss Anastasia Paramore who has joined our group as a DEng student (4-year doctorate degree). Her work is on surface inspection using machine learning.

October 2015 - Welcome to Mr. Taiwei Wang who is joining our group as an MSc by Research student (one year research only). Taiwei is working on 3D object segmentation and registration.

September 2015 - The 26th British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC) was successfully hosted in Swansea. It was the largest edition in BMVC history. We had record number of submissions (553), record number of papers (183; 41 oral), record number of delegates (331), and the largest workshop programmes. The conference proceedings can be found online (video recordings of oral presentation, including tutorial and keynotes, are being added to the site): BMVC 2015 Proceedings.

July 2015 - For the second time, we are hosting the BMVA Computer Vision Summer School this July. This is the 20th edition and CVSS is the longest running summer school in the field. This year's event features 17 speakers from both academia and industry, e.g. Microsoft.

May 2015 - Congratulations to Ehab Essa and Jonathan Jones, whose paper titled “Minimum s-Excess Graph for Segmenting and Tracking Multiple Borders with HMM” has been accepted for presentation for the MICCAI 2015 conference. MICCAI is the top conference in medical computing.

Oct 2014 - Welcome to Mr. David George who started his PhD. David will be investigating the co-segmentation of the collection of 3D shapes to increase the accuracy of the segmented regions of each shape.

July 2014 - BMVA Computer Vision Summer School 2014 is being hosted at Swansea from 30 June to 4 July 2014. A total of 67 delegates from 14 different countries ( 21 from outside UK) are attending the 19th edition of this summer school. 17 speakers from both academia and industry are delivering 19 lectures and 2 lab sessions. Click here to visit the summer school website.

May 2014 - J. Deng, X. Xie, and B. Daubney, A bag of words approach to subject specific 3D human pose interaction classification with random decision forests, Graphical Models, vol. 76, no. 3, pp. 162-171, 2014. See more publications...

March 2014 - Congratulations to Arron Lacey who successfully defended his MSc by Research thesis, titled "Supervised Machine Learning Techniques in Bioinformatics: Protein Classification".

Jan 2014 - A. Paiement, M. Mirmehdi, X. Xie, and M. Hamilton, Integrated Segmentation and Interpolation of Sparse Data, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, volume 23, issue 1, pages 110-125, January 2014. See more publications...

Aug 2013 - We are just setting up our new Biometric Lab with 3D/4D cameras from 3dMD, Point Grey Gazelle high speed cameras, Kinect and Canon EOS cameras. The equipment will be primarily used for 3D and 4D reconstruction experiments by Xianghua Xie and Gary Tam.

Apr 2013, Dr. Xianghua Xie has been elevated to Senior Member of IEEE since April 2013.

Apr 2013, Welcome to Mr. Jingjing Deng who started his PhD. Jingjing will be working on medical image analysis, especially on interactive segmentation.

Nov 2012, Congratulations to Jingjing Deng who successfully defended his MSc by Research viva. He became the first MSc by Research graduate from the department. His thesis is titled "Towards Human Interaction Modelling".

Oct 2012 - X. Xie joined the BMVA executive committee. The BMVA provides a national forum for individuals and organisations involved in machine vision, image processing, and pattern recognition in the United Kingdom.

Oct 2012 - X. Xie was invited to give a seminar in the Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing at University of Surrey. His talk is entitled "Deformable Objects".

Sep 2012 - Xianghua Xie et al., Image Gradient Based Level Set Methods in 2D and 3D, In Deformation Models, Edited by G. Hidalgo et al., Springer, September, 2012. See more publications...

Jul 2012 - Xianghua Xie, Editor, Proceedings of the 16th Conference on Medical Image Understanding and Analysis, BMVA Press, July 2012. See more publications...

Jul 2012 - The 16th Conference on Medical Image Understanding and Analysis (MIUA) was held at Swansea University between 9th and 11th July 2012. MIUA is the principal UK forum for communicating research progress within the community interested in image analysis applied to medicine and related biological science. It has been a successful series begun in Oxford in 1997. This edition featured 4 keynote speeches: Prof. Alison Noble (Oxford), Prof. Guang-Zhong Yang (Imperial), Prof. Daniel Alexander (UCL), Prof. Perumal Nithiarasu (Swansea), and a half day tutorial by Prof. Nikos Komodakis (Crete, Greece). Visit MIUA2012 website for more details and full proceedings.

Jan 2012 - X. Xie appointed as an Associated Editor of the IET Computer Vision journal. The vision of the journal is to publish the highest quality research work that is relevant and topical to the field, but not forgetting those works that aim to introduce new horizons and set the agenda for future avenues of research in Computer Vision.

Nov 2011, Warm welcome to Dr. Feng Zhao who joined the team as a post-doc Research Officer. Feng obtained his first degree in a top university in China and PhD from HongKong, and recently completed a post-doc position at Londonderry.

Oct 2011, Welcome to Mr. Jonathan Jones who started his PhD in Medical Image Segmentation. Jonathan is a first class master graduate from Swansea Computer Science.

Oct 2011, Welcome to Mr. Arron Lacey who started his MSc by Research. Arron obtained his first degree in Physics and MSc in Computer Science at Swansea.

Aug 2011, Si Yong Yeo completed his PhD, thesis titled "Implicit Deformable Models for Biomedical Image Segmentation"

Aug 2011, Ren Liu completed his MRes, thesis titled "Human Detection in Single Images"

Jun 2011 - Ben Daubney and Xianghua Xie, Tracking 3D Human Pose with Large Root Node Uncertainty, In Proceedings of the 24th IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), June 2011. See more publications...

Apr 2011 - X. Xie chaired and organised a half day session on "Imaging, Segmentation and Meshing" for the EPSRC Network Meeting on Patient-Specific Meeting. Invited speakers include Prof. Stephen Daniels (Cardiff), Prof. Oubay Hassan (Swansea), Prof. Peter Hoskin (Edinburgh), Prof. Majid Mirmehdi (Bristol), Prof. Sebastien Ourselin (UCL), and Prof. Tudor Griffith (Cardiff).

Feb 2011 - Xianghua Xie and Majid Mirmehdi, Radial Basis Function based Level Set Interpolation and Evolution for Deformable Modelling, Image and Vision Computing, volume 29, issues 2-3, 167 - 177, February 2011. See more publications...

Jun 2010, Welcome to Dr. Dongbin Chen who started his postdoc at Swansea University.

Apr 2010 - X. Xie acted as an co-chair of the RIVIC Visual Computing Graduate School 2010.

Jun 2009 - Grant Capture: Wales Research Institute on Visual Computing (RIVIC), Dr X. Xie is leading a sub-programme on 3D Vision and Medical Image Analysis. RIVIC attracts £5M funding from WAG, 2009-2013.