Surrey awarded prestigious Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship
Dr Charles Malleson has been awarded a prestigious Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship to support his research at the University of Surrey.
Through this fellowship Dr Malleson, from Surrey’s Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing (CVSSP) will investigate non-contact tracking and understanding of animal motion in unconstrained environments.
Motion capture has numerous applications, from entertainment (film, video and game production, virtual/augmented reality) to bio-mechanics (gait analysis for rehabilitation and high-performance sport analysis for athlete training). Human motion capture from natural video has been a central challenge in computer vision for the past two decades, but little attention has been directed towards video-based motion capture of animals. Dr Malleson’s fellowship will address the problem of non-contact motion capture of animals in the wild and will open up new collaborative research directions The research will advance our understanding of animal motion and ultimately impact animal welfare and healthcare applications by enabling non-invasive monitoring of animals – such as pets, livestock and wild animals.
Dr Malleson is a Research Fellow in Computer Vision at CVSSP. His research includes image and video processing, immersive content production, general dynamic 3D reconstruction and marker-less human and animal motion capture using multi-modal input, including multiple-view video, depth and inertial sensors. Charles obtained his PhD in computer vision from the University of Surrey in 2015 with the thesis ‘Dynamic scene modelling and representation from video and depth’ and was a post-doctoral research associate at Disney Research, working on computer vision for immersive content production.
Dr Malleson said: “I am honoured to have been awarded the fellowship and look forward to the opportunity to apply our work to the field of animal motion understanding and to the new interdisciplinary collaboration opportunities that this will bring.”
Professor Adrian Hilton, Director CVSSP at the University of Surrey, said: “Over the past three years Charles has led research in AI for real-time human 3D performance capture from video, developing a system for application on location in the creative industries (film, games, VR). His work on non-contact tracking of human motion has generated great interest at different public events – including the Royal Society’s You and AI, GREAT Festival- Hong Kong and the Barbican’s More than Human.
“This fellowship will enable Charles to translate his work into establishing a new research capability in non-contact animal motion analysis to support healthcare and welfare of both domestic and wild animals.”
