Digital Systems and Vision Processing Research Group

David Pycock

Background

On graduating in 1972 I joined EMI Research Laboratories where I worked on the development of CT X-Ray scanners. I was responsible for the design of electronic positioning systems, digital control systems, the design of collimators, system maintenance and evaluation during clinical trials. In 1977 I moved to the University of Manchester as a founding member of the Wolfson Image Analysis (now Imaging Science and Biomedical Engineering) and worked on Cell Image Analysis, Chromosome Analysis, Asbestos Fibre Counting and Industrial Inspection systems. In December 1989 I joined The University of Birmingham and have continued my research on image interpretation.

Personal

I live in Northfield with my wife Anne and I am a Lay Reader in the Church of England at St Mary's Church Selly Oak. I am an Assistant Warden of Readers in the Diocese of Birmingham. The Diocese of Birmingham Readers (this is a temporary web location) also now have a web page.

Research Studentships in Computer Vision

RADARNet
This is a large EC funded project on driver aids. This is a description of the University of Birmingham contribution to RADARNet

Download Files from my ftp directory

Teaching Duties

I am responsible for an integrated suite of M.Sc degree programmes:

M.Sc. in Communications Engineering

M.Sc. in Satellite and Mobile Communications

M.Sc. in Communication Networks

M.Sc. in Embedded Systems

M.Sc. in Electronic and Computer Engineering

The above programmes of study are all standard 12 month M.Sc. programmes. Each of these programmes are also available as an M.Sc. with Industrial Studies. This is an 18 month programme of study.

Download a copy of the brochure for these programmes here.

The modules of these and our other M.Sc. programmes are available as Short Courses (registered under the IEE CPD scheme).

M.Sc Introductory Module:
Software Design and Programming

Intranet material

A few tips for C Programming assignments html, Word and pdf format.

Further information on C Programming

Code examples from the Indispensable Guide to C by PJ Davies (ISBN 0201 62438 9)

A specific page on C Programming

For Microsoft Visual C/C++ see:

MSDNA scheme

Licence terms

For GNUC there are many sites.

Home of GNU

W9X gnuc (cygwin)

An IDE for GNUC on W9X

This is a part module and is taught with P Jancovic

The topics covered include:

Basic concepts
Assignment
Flow control (if, if-else, dangling else, for, while, do-while, for, switch)
Functions (passing arguments by value and by reference, return values associated with the function name)
Arrays
Strings
Separate compilation
Dynamic memory
Macros
Procedural software design (JSP and Data Flow)

EE4MH: Computer Vision
Intranet material

Computer Vision assignment allocations (2006)

Link to Image collection

Link to CVOnline a repository of books on Computer Vision that are available on-line.

The Hypermedia Image Processing Reference is an on line tutorial held at the University of Edinburgh.

I lecture on Shape Measurement, Medial Axis Transforms, Mathematical Morphology ...................

Mike Spann lectures on Linear and Non-linear filters, Motion Analysis, Colour Image Processing.

EE3J1: Artificial Intelligence: Computer Vision
Intranet material

EE2E (part) & EEM4E(part): Object-Oriented Design

Although the materials are common the detailed content of these modules differs. The OOD part of EE2E is related to Java and does not include quality metrics. The OOD part of EE4ME is related to C++ and includes material on quality metrics.
Intranet material

Other sources of information

General Information sources

Object Oriented Design & Programming

Object-Oriented Information Sources

An Online Book (and an IDE for Gnu C++ but no UML)

Here's a fun site with lot's of info on UML, Java, Smalltalk, ............

Martin Fowler's Home Page (he of UML Distilled)

See paper on: Techniques for Object Oriented Analysis and Design

Alsiatair Cockburn's Home Page (Author of "Surviving Object-oriented Projects" and other papers on UML, Use-Cases etc).

Papers & Books

Risk Reduction Patterns

Writing Effective Use-Cases

I lecture on the concepts of OOP and OOD, the UML (1.2 /1.3) method and on quality metrics.

Mike Spann lectures on C++, operator overloading, polymorphism, templates and container classes.

EE3F2: Interactive Computer Graphics
Intranet material

Undergraduate Projects

B.Eng. Web-Based Projects 2005-6

Sample web pages

Initial Assignment description html pdf

Powerpoint Introduction slides

To Purchase HTMLPAD got to the Blumentals web site.

Undergraduate Projects

B.Eng. PIC-Based Projects 2010-11

My "Office hour" during the Autumn term is:

Friday 10:00 am to 11:00 am

At this time I will normally be available to see students but please make an appointment. If there is an urgent matter please email or telephone me to arrange an appointment at some other time.

Outside of term time please email me (D.Pycock@bham.ac.uk) to arrange an appointment.

Current Research Interests

Cell Image Interpretation

I am continuing my research on Cell Image interpretation with a programme of research to develop decision support tools for cytology automation. This is a link to a Powerpoint presentation that outlines the goal of this work. This presentation was written for the benefit of potential sponsors and is not a technical presentation.

Recent EPSRC Funded Projects

Machine Learning for Cell Image Interpretation (Ping Zhou)

Thermo-Optical Inspection of Electronic Power Modules (Jan A Zandhuis)

Using Structured Lighting with Stereoscopic Imaging to Measure Defects in the Highway (AE Grace)

Recent Research Student Projects

Model-Based Multi-Modal Image Registration (Rehan Ahmed P/T)

Bandwidth Management for the Transmission of High Quality Still Images (Mounther Salous)

Multi-Scale, Model-Based, Multi-Modal Medical Image Registration (Ming Xu)

Performance Evaluation of the Contract-Net (Derek Carter)

Programming Heterogeneous Parallel Systems (Robert Jackson)

PhD Project Outlines

Colour Scene Interpretation (with Jaguar Cars Ltd.) Taken by Zeju Shotte

Image Interpretation in the Assessment of Intracranial DistortionTaken
Estimating the Volume of Stroke Lesions Taken

Unfunded projects
Automation of Colposcopy Interpretation
Stereoscopic Active Colour Vision
Heterogeneous Architectures for Integrating Numeric and Symbolic Processing (See papers below for more details)
Model-Based Multi-Modal Image Registration
Reasoning by Analogy for Image Interpretation
Model-Based Interpretation of Stereoscopic Images
Inspecting Traffic Signs by Active Colour Vision
Counting Tree Canopies from Low-Level Colour Aerial Images

Selected Collaborators

DERA, Malvern

Federal Mogul Technologies

Jaguar Cars

NeuroSciences Unit, The University Hospital Birmingham NHS Trust

Unilever Research

Recent Papers

This is not a complete list of papers.

Luo, B and Pycock D, Unified Multi-Scale Corner Detection, Update to the paper presnted at the 4^th IASTED International Conference on Visualisation, Imaging and Image Processing (Ed. Villanueva, JJ), Sept. 2004. ( paper as a pdf file 0.5 MBytes and powerpoint presentation) 0.8 MBytes

Jackson RO, Pycock D, Xu M, Knowles MW and Harman S, Event Detection and Period Extraction using Symmetry and Entropy, submitted to Signal Processing.

Pycock D, Pammu S and Goode AJ, Robust Model-Based Signal Analysis and Identification, extended version of paper below - submitted to Pattern Recognition..

Pycock D, Pammu S and Goode AJ, Robust Model-Based Signal Analysis and Identification, IEE Colloquia on Applied Statistical Pattern Recognition, 20 April, 1999.

Stannard EE and Pycock D, Recognising 2-D Shapes from Incomplete Boundaries, IEE Colloquia on Applied Statistical Pattern Recognition, 20 April, 1999 (postscript file 3MBytes, compressed postscript file 518 KBytes).

Xu M and Pycock D, Non-Linear Medial Transform in Scale Space, Journal of Mathematical Imaging, 11, 3, pp 277-99, 1999.

AE Grace, D Pycock, HT Tillotson and MS Snaith, Active Stereo for Highway Inspection, submitted to Machine Vision and Applications.

Xu M and Pycock D, Estimating True Symmetry in Scale-Space, in Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. on SMC'98, San Diego California, Oct. 1998 (Postscript file 828 KBytes, Zipped file 286 KBytes).

Salous MN and Pycock D, The Management of Bandwidth Utilisation for Image Transmission, in Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. on SMC'98, San Diego California, Oct. 1998 (Postscript file 723 KBytes, Zipped file 292 KBytes).

Xu M and Pycock D, Multiscale Greyscale Medial Axes in Scale-space, BMVC'98, Southampton.

P Zhou and D. Pycock, Robust Statistical Models for Cell Image Interpretation, Image and Vision Computing, 15, 4, pp 307-316, 1997.

J.A. Zandhuis, D. Pycock, S.F. Quigley and P.W. Webb, Sub-Pixel Non-Parametric PSF Estimation for Image Enhancement, IEE Proceedings on
Signal and Image Processing, 144, 5, pp 285-292, 1997.

R.O. Jackson and D. Pycock, Contract-Linda: A Paradigm for Programming Heterogeneous Parallel Systems, SPIE 1997 International Symposium, Conference on Parallel and Distributed Models for Image Processing (3166), San Deigo, July 1997 (Postscript file 152 KBytes, Zipped file 61 KBytes).

AE Grace and D Pycock, Multi-Resolution Active Contour Models in Textured-Stereo Images, in Proceedings BMVC'96, Edinburgh, pp 575-584, 1996.

D Carter and D Pycock, Performance Evaluation of the Contract-Net, presented at the Performance Evaluation Workshop, Edinburgh, 1996.