The Visual Information Laboratory has experienced significant success in attracting a balanced portfolio of research funding. Since 2008, the group has attracted income of approximately £5.9M. Furthermore, since 2008, the Group has published over 60 journal papers and 118 conference papers and submitted 4 patent applications.
VI-lab is highly regarded for combining fundamental research with strong industrial collaboration. In 2001, it spun-out ProVision Communication Technologies Ltd, which was the first company in the world to deliver robust HDTV streaming over commercial wireless LAN technology. Over the past 3 years VI-lab has collaborated with a major Far East consumer electronics company to exploit its SLAM technology. Collaboration with a US company, Applied Science laboratories, has led to an innovative product - GazeMap - for automatic collection of Gaze Tracking data.
The Group has engaged and led a number of successful TSB projects. These include: ViewNet which produced one of the first practical realisations of wide area augmented reality on mobile devices and VISUALISE which produced the first system for robust video delivery to portable terminals at public events. It has recently won a further TSB Digital Britain grant- ARKive in Your Pocket, collaborating with BBC, Wildscreen, Motorola, Toshiba, Mubaloo and ProVision Communications.
The Group benefits significantly from national and international collaboration. At Bristol it has worked closely with strong groups in Statistics, Experimental Psychology, Biology, Anatomy, Mechanical Enginering, Biochemistry and Pharmacology as well as with the Bristol Robotics Lab, the Centre for Communications Research, Bristol Royal Infirmary and the Bristol Urological Institute.
The group has ongoing collaborations with a number of UK Universities and organisation through EPSRC funded projects, DTI funded UIC and MOD / DSTL sponsored UDRC programme. These include: NPL, Cambridge, Oxford, University of Leeds and Imperial College.
The Group has worked closely with a number of overseas organisations, via European IST projects and other direct links. For example, it has or has had links with The Institute for Infocomm Research (Singapore), UCL (Belgium), EPFL (Switzerland), Inria (France), ST Microelectronics Research Laboratory (Italy), ENST Brest (France), Thales Research (France), HHI (Germany), UJI (Spain), Cornell University (USA), UCSD (USA), Purdue (USA), AIST (Japan), the National University of Mexico, Dolby (USA, Canada), Adobe (USA), University of Zargoza (Spain), Toshiba, Sepura, Ordnance Survey, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, CNRS/University of Compiegne, CCG (Portugal), the Max Plank Institute of Biological Cybernetics (Germany) and KUSTAR (UAE).
The Bristol region provides a strong commercial presence in the imaging and media fields with activities in security and surveillance, communications and consumer technology, military image analysis, broadcasting, filmaking, natural history, medicine and robotics. The group therefore provides a major regional (as well as UK) focus for imaging research.