Timothy Francis Cootes

University of Manchester
Imaging Sciences
Stopford Building
Oxford Road
Manchester M13 9PT
United Kingdom
phone: (+44) 161 275 5146
fax: (+44) 161 275 5145
email: Tim.Cootes at manchester.ac.uk
WWW: Home Page

Qualifications

Doctoral Study : "Monitoring A Vortex Storm Sewage Overflow with Peripheral Spill",
Sheffield City Polytechnic, 1990
Degree : BSc, Combined Maths and Physics, (Upper II), University of Exeter, 1986
`A' Levels : Mathematics (A), Further Mathematics (A), Physics (A), Electronics (A)
`AO' Levels : Applicable Mathematics (A)
`O' Levels : Mathematics (A), Physics (A), English Literature (A), English Language (A), Chemistry (A), Technical Drawing (A), History (B), Design Technology (B)

Research Experience

1991-93 : VISAGE Industrial Inspection Project (Funded by SERC)
1993 : `Appearance Models for Interpretting Complex Images' (SERC)
1993-95 : SERC Postgraduate Fellowship Award
1995-July 97 : EPSRC Advanced Fellowship Award
July-Sep 97 : Sabbatical working for Kestra Ltd, developing PCB inspection algorithms
Oct 1997-Dec 2000 : Back to EPSRC Advanced Fellowship Award
Jan 2001-May 2001 : Research Associate on soft money
June 2001- Sept 2002 : Lecturer in ISBE
Oct 2002 - July 2005 Senior Lecturer in ISBE
Aug 2005 - July 2006 Reader in ISBE
Aug 2006 - Professorial Research Fellow (Professor of Computer Vision) Imaging Sciences
My research has concentrated on developing models of the appearance of objects in digital images, using statistical models to represent variation in both shape and the grey-level appearance. The models are typically trained on sets of labelled examples. I have developed search algorithms to use these models to locate examples in new images.

For more details, see my publications.

Teaching

I run the following courses:
Mathematical Methods with Computing, covering classification theory, optimisation methods, root finding, modelling of functions etc.

Supervision

I supervised the following PhD students to successful completion:
Current students (as Main Supervisor): Current students (as co-Supervisor):

Brief Biography

After completing a degree in Mathematics and Physics at Exeter, Tim Cootes did a PhD in Civil Engineering, monitoring a storm sewer overflow in Sheffield. During this project he was introduced to the delights of computer vision, and shortly after completing it, he took up a research position at the University of Manchester. He began working on statistical models of shape, and was awarded an EPSRC Postdoctoral fellowship, followed by a 5 year Advanced Fellowship, to develop his ideas further. The algorithms that he and colleagues invented have been adopted world-wide, and applied to many different application areas, including interpreting images of faces and medical image analysis. Tim was appointed as a lecturer at the University in 2001, and after a series of promotions became a Professor of Computer Vision in 2006.
He has wide ranging interests in the field of computer vision, but concentrates on statistical models of shape and appearance, their construction and application to both medical images and images of faces. He has published over 125 peer reviewed papers in the field. He was on the committee of the British Machine Vision Association for many years and acted as its chairman for 3 years (2002-5). He reviews for all the major conferences and journals in the field and has acted as an Area Chair for several international conferences.
In 2010 he was made a Fellow of the International Association for Pattern Recognition.
In 2014 he was awarded the title of BMVA Distinguished Fellow 2014.