Computer Vision for Facial Behaviour Analysis

 Fixed Term Appointment for up to 18 months

The preferred starting date for this post is April 2012

Salary in the range: £31, 300 - £39,920 per annum

The Department of Computing is a leading department of Computer Science among UK Universities. It has consistently been awarded the highest research rating (5*) in Research Assessment Exercises (RAE), coming 2nd in the 2008 RAE, and was rated as "Excellent" in the previous national assessment of teaching quality.

An opportunity has arisen for a Research Associate (post-doctoral) for the prestigious European Research Council Starting Grant funded project on human naturalistic behaviour analysis. The purpose of the project is to attempt to build automated tools for machine understanding of human interactive behaviour in naturalistic contexts. The envisioned technology will be based on findings in cognitive sciences and it will represent a set of visual (and audiovisual) spatiotemporal methods for automatic analysis of human spontaneous (as opposed to posed and exaggerated) patterns of behavioural cues including continuous analysis of affective, social and deceptive behaviour.

Within the project, the applicant will be responsible for vision-based analysis of human facial behaviour. More specifically, the aim is to design and develop effective and efficient tools for facial point detection, head pose detection and tracking, face tracking, facial expression recognition, head and body gestures recognition in space and time.  The end results will contribute to development of more natural user interfaces as well as to development of computer-based analysis of human spontaneous behaviour displayed in various contexts.

To apply you will need to have a strong computing or engineering background. You should have proven knowledge and track record in the area of vision-based human behaviour analysis (in particular face analysis).  You will have a PhD degree (or equivalent) in an area pertinent to the subject area, i.e., Computing or Engineering.

You must have excellent communication skills and be able to organize your own work with minimal supervision and prioritize work to meet deadlines. Preference will be given to applicants with a proven research record and publications in the relevant areas.  All applicants must be fluent in English. 

You will be part of the Intelligent Behaviour Understanding (i-BUG) Group, Visual Information Processing Research Section, within the Computing Department and based at the South Kensington campus. For further information on the group and related projects http://ibug.doc.ic.ac.uk/~maja/