Prof. Robert Fisher
Visual analysis of animal behaviour
An advantage of video is that it can allow extraction of information not commonly accessible by human observers. This includes high-speed behaviour, multi-year trends, or subtle differences. This talk will present some examples from projects that
- observed bats with 500 frame/second stereo imaging,
- recorded 100k hours of undersea coral reef fish over a period of 3 years, and
- visually estimated the number of unique clownfish from another a set of observations.
A brief mention of piglet monitoring will also be given.
Bio
Prof. Robert Fisher has received a BS (Mathematics, California Institute of Technology, 1974), MS (Computer Science, Stanford, 1978) and a PhD (Edinburgh, 1987). Since then, Bob has been an academic in the School of Informatics at University of Edinburgh. His research covers topics in high level and 3D computer vision, focussing on reconstructing geometric models from existing examples, which contributed to a spin-off company, Dimensional Imaging. More recently, he has also been researching video sequence understanding, in particular attempting to understand observed animal behaviour. The research has led to 13 authored or edited books and about 250 peer-reviewed scientific articles. He has developed several online computer vision resources, with over 1 million hits. Most recently, he has been the coordinator of an EC STREP project acquiring and analysing video data of 1.4 billion fish from over about 20 camera-years of undersea video of tropical coral reefs.