Tim has successfully supervised seven MPhil and 16 PhD students. He is currently supervising nine research students.

• Nora is building systems to recognize facial expressions. The unique aspect of her work is that the systems deal with subjects of all ages plus mixtures of emotions.
• Qin is investigating methods of quantifying texture. These will be used to assess diabetic retinopathy.
• Rob is researching the infrastructure required for home-based ambient intelligent systems.
• Najlaa is looking into methods of determining location using image data only, with the intention that this will be a navigation aid for the visually impaired.
• Abdullah in looking at novel ways of quantifying AMD.
• Abeer and Michael are researching methods of detecting obstructions in the pathway - to aid blind/visually impaired navigate safely.
• Terry is looking at ways to use video data to locate a drone's posion and pose.
• Mario is investigating input devices that have multiple degrees of freedom.

He welcomes applications from students interested in researching image processing/computer vision problems in topics related to his research interests:

• Texture,
• Assistive technologies and
• Medical image understanding

Further information can be found at the school’s Postgraduate research page

B Sc in Physics from Southampton University

PhD in Medical Physics, University of Sheffield

Research Group(s)

• Advanced Interfaces

Tim Morris was appointed a lecturer in the Department of Computation at UMIST in 1985.  He is now in the School of Computer Science, working in the Advanced Interfaces/Computer Vision Research Group.

He gained degrees in Physics and Medical Physics from the Universities of Southampton and Sheffield respecively. He worked for a while at the British Glass Industry Research Association (now British Glass) before joining UMIST.

Apart from the academic papers listed seperately, he has published two textbooks: Multimedia Systems (Springer-Verlag, 2000) and Computer Vision and Image Processing (Palgrave, 2004).

He has been a member of the IEEE and a member of their Technical Committees on Multimedia Computing, Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, and Emergent Technologies.

Dr Tim Morris researches real-time video processing problems, texture measurement and image segmentation issues. Video processing research finds applications in creating intelligent assistants - such as non-contact computer interfaces based on speech or image input - and in video-mediated communication. Research into image segmentation is being demonstrated by the interpretation of medical images. His postgraduate students have worked on different aspects of perceptual interfaces (using head orientation and gestures as communication channels); on video coding and coded data quality assessment; on interpretation of medical imagery; and on video-telephony.

He is currently involved in two research areas:

Retinal Image Processing

The retina is affected by many illnesses; we are looking at glaucoma, diabetes and macular degeneration. We are interested in diagnosing glaucoma and monitoring its progress in an objective fashion since it has been shown that the variability amongst optometrists is of the same magnitude as the changes associated with glaucoma. Similarly, we are attempting to separate patients known to be diabetic into groups with lower and higher risk of losing vision or developing other complications.

A side issue in this research is to investigate methods of quantifying texture.

Assistive Technology

Visually handicapped people have different needs in using home and office equipment or in navigating unknown areas. We are investigating two problems:

• How can a visually handicapped person determine their location without the benefit of visual cues? Again, handheld devices are being investigated in the solution.
• How can a visually handicapped person navigate through the envoronment in a safe fashion? Can we develop devices that are easier/more reliable than a white cane?

In both cases the handheld device (probably a smartphone) will capture images, process them to determine the appropriate information, and deliver audio output.