| Citation | Distinguished for his work in artificial intelligence and its application to the visual guidance of robot manipulators and vehicles. He was one of the first information scientists to apply Marr's ideas on human vision to the engineering problems of computer vision. His pioneer work on the automatic transcription of handwritten coding sheets demonstrated the need for visual representations at many levels of description, and led to the first working theory of the early visual processes involved in human reading. His work on the shapes of three-dimensional surfaces imaginatively combined ideas from group theory, descriptive differential geometry and the optimal interpretation of noisy measurements. His work in robot vision has demonstrated the paramount importance of computational stability in the algorithms used for integrating the information from successive images, and has shown how the performance of conventional stereo algorithms can be equalled in efficiency and reliability by the matching of distinctive curves. He has recently applied the techniques of stereo and photometric stereo to the monitoring of glaucoma development, and is actively involved in other medical applications.
Through the work of his research groups, in both the UK and the USA, he has been a pioneer in the push towards the hardware demonstration of robots with diverse sensory capabilities. In this way, and through the scientific journals he has founded and/or edited, he has exerted a major influence over the development of robotics and artificial intelligence, particularly robot vision. |