The Partner

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University of Westminster
Harrow School of Computer Science (HSCS)

The Harrow School of Computer Science has a long record in research activities and postgraduate degrees in the disciplines of Artificial Intelligence, Computer Networks, Computer Vision and Digital Imaging, IT Security, Interactive Multimedia, High Performance and Scientific Computing. Research in the School is supported by the Sir George Cayley Graduate Centre and is carried out under a number of schemes including Teaching Companies, Research Councils grants, European Union Initiatives and Industrial Projects. On-going joint schemes with other European universities encompass research collaboration, student and staff exchange. The School also hosts the Advanced IT Centre of Excellence for North-West London, funded by the Department for Education and Skills with sponsorships from major computer manufacturers such as Silicon Graphics and SoftImage.

The Computer Vision and Virtual Reality Research Group at HSCS currently comprises of a team of four active research staff and five PhD students. Research in the group focuses on two main areas:

• the study of statistical and probabilistic learning methodologies and their application
  in visual perception of human identities and behaviours;
• the analysis and content-based search techniques of image and video databases.

The work proposed in this project will build on extensive research already established at HSCS over the past eight years as part of a number of collaborative projects including but not limited to learned temporal models, multi-view face recognition, content-based search of digitised manuscripts (HISTORIA - DGXIII Libraries 3117) and restoration of works of art (diARTgnosis - CULTURE 2000). The main HSCS contributions to the project are:

• Overall project management and co-ordination as part of the management team
• design, implementation and integration of all the computational models and software systems of the project. This involves the computational modelling of the ink and support and their integration with historical information. It also encompasses the design and implementation of the user interface, the online image and model databases as well as the final integration, evaluation and testing of the system.