Category: News

Together with University of California at Berkeley, University of Jenna, NICTA and Daimler we are organising a workshop in representation learning at the IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium in Gothenburg, Sweden.

Vision is a rich and un-intrusive sensor modality that can be captured by cheap and flexible sensors. However, its strengths are also its downside as it is challenging to extract what is relevant from the high dimensional signal. Recently computer vision has experienced what can only be referred to as a revolution. The second coming of neural networks, known as deep learning, has lead to a significant increase in performance in tasks across the field. It is now possible to learn image representations directly from data rather than relying on ad-hoc handcrafted features.

The aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers to discuss both theoretical and practical issues related to the application of deep vision techniques for intelligent vehicles. We want to demonstrate what computer vision currently is capable of and identify important directions of future work. The workshop will be centered around a set of invited talks from prominent researchers together with a poster session of submitted extended abstracts as well as a tutorial in the afternoon. The tutorial will focus on the software library caffe, one of the most popular convolutional neural network toolboxes for vision tasks.

In an episode of The One Show which aired on the 15th April, BVI contributed to an item demonstrating the dangers of texting while driving. Recent studies have indicated that reading and even writing text messages while behind the wheel is on the rise, especially amongst younger adults.

After approaching the BVI for advice on the best way to communicate this to its audience, The One Show production team invited University of Bristol BVI researcher Dr Felix Mercer Moss onto an airfield just outside Bristol to help perform an experiment.

A BVI mobile eye tracker was used to discover that drivers navigating the makeshift course spent as manyas two seconds looking away from the road while replying to a text. The same drivers then learnt that for subsequent laps a customised pair of ‘black-out’ goggles would be worn that simulated their inattention on previous laps.

The `black-out’ goggles caused carnage on the airfield, and in doing so, provided viewers with a stark reminder to keep their phones in their pockets when on the road.

To watch before Sunday 16th May, go to minute 13:44 on the link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b078wvcs/the-one-show-15042016

Press release issued: 23 March 2015

A new £1.4 million research project led by the University of Bristol will use engineering and science in the design of radically new approaches and solutions to vision-based technology.