First Grant Success – monitoring animal faces

Yorgos Tzimiropoulos, Assistant Professor in Computer Science, has been awarded an EPSRC First Grant. This scheme is for new academics at the start of their career and is highly competitive, with only the very best applicants achieving success.

Dr Tzimiropoulos’s research will develop computational tools for monitoring animals and their behaviour in the field of animal health and welfare. Novel tools will be developed for detecting and tracking animal facial behaviour and, in particular, for learning and fitting facial deformable models of animals (a technique to model the variability in faces) to unconstrained images/video (recorded “in the wild”).

Aside from the emotional value that they may have to people, animals are also important to society and the economy, and developing such tools will be a big, transformative step with direct impact on all these areas. Besides animal health and welfare, the computer vision tools to be developed by the project can be used to facilitate research in other scientific disciplines, such as animal behaviour, vision and robotics.

Dr Tzimiropoulos recently joined the University of Nottingham from the University of Lincoln, where he carried out research on understanding cat pain. If you own a cat, you may like to upload videos or photos of your pet to help with the study: http://ucpproject.co.uk/