Keynote Speakers
Professor Peter Hering
Professor Tim Cootes
Ludo Vermeulen
Professor Vicki Bruce
Professor Dirk Vandermeulen
Prof Peter Hering, Professor of Physics University Dusseldorf.
Peter Hering was born in Messkirch/Baden, Germany. He studied physics and mathematics in Freiburg, Bristol and at the newly founded University of Kaiserslautern, where he received his diploma and Ph.D. degree in physics (Supervisor Wolfgang Demtröder and Klaas Bergmann). From 1978-79 he worked as a research associate at the well-known Rice Quantum Institute in Houston/Texas with Phil Brooks and Bob Curl (Nobel Prize 1996) on transition state spectroscopy. From 1979-1991 he was with the Max-Planck-Institute for Quantum Optics (Karl L. Kompa) in Garching, Germany, mainly working in laser chemistry with emphasis on nonadiabatic collision processes and the development of new nonlinear laser spectroscopic techniques.
Since 1991 he is full Professor of Physics at the newly founded interdisciplinary institute of Laser Medicine at the University of Düsseldorf. His work there is devoted to basic research in analytical and diagnostical laser application in biomedicine and environmental research. In October 1999 he got additionally an appointment at caesar (center of advanced european studies and research) in Bonn as an external independent project leader in the triplet "Laser and Computer Aided Surgery". The focus there is on the development of new imaging methods based on short-pulsed holography and on contact less methods for bone treatment. Recent areas of application are the treatment of extremely temperature-sensitive materials with pulsed lasers and the development and implementation of a mobile holographic camera in medicine (craniofacial surgery, plastic surgery), archaeology, criminology and forensic medicine.
Keynote speech abstract
3D Facial Measurement Using Holographic Tomography
For planning, simulation and documentation of interventions in maxillofacial surgery high resolving soft tissue information of the human face in upright position is needed. This information can be gained by holographic methods, which allow a recording of the whole face in an extremely short time period, so that no movement artifacts occur.
The hologram is recorded with a single laser pulse of 35 ns duration and stored in photosensitive material. After automated wet-chemical processing, the hologram is optically reconstructed with a cw-laser digitized into a set of two-dimensional projections. Digital image processing leads to a three-dimensional computer model. Besides the topometric information, a high resolving pixel precise texture is also extracted from the holographic reconstruction and used for the texturing of the computer models.
In addition to the medical application, high resolving and textured computer models of faces are of tremendous importance for facial reconstruction in anthropology, forensic science and archaeology.
Prof. Tim Cootes
Tim Cootes has a degree in Mathematics and Physics from Exeter University, and a PhD in Civil Engineering from Sheffield. He entered the field of Computer Vision in 1991, taking a research post at Manchester. His work since then has concentrated on constructing statistical models of shape and appearance for image interpretation, with particular emphasis on applications in medical image analysis and face interpretation. He was awarded an EPSRC Advanced Fellowship in 1995, and became a lecturer in 2001. He was promoted to the post of Professorial Research Fellow in 2006. Tim has published over 100 conference papers and 26 journal papers. He has also been involved with three spin-off companies, exploiting his computer vision algorithms in different fields.
His research has been in the area of constructing statistical models of shape and appearance and their variation. An important application of such models is representing the human face. He has constructed statistical models of facial appearance from hundreds of individuals, and used such models for automatic facial interpretation from images.
Keynote speech abstract
Building and Using Statistical Models of Facial Appearance
Statistical models of the shape and appearance of objects have been developed in the field of Computer Vision to represent and interpret images of deformable objects. They have been applied with particular success to modelling the appearance of the human face, and such models have been used to recognise people, to track their faces and to interpret facial gestures (such as detecting different expressions). In this talk Tim Cootes will describe how such models can be constructed from large sets of training images, and give examples of their application.
Click here to learn more about Tim and his research
Ludo Vermeulen
DDS Dentistry: university Leuven BelgiumGeneral dentistry Tessenderlo Belgium
Forensic odontology: university San Antonio USA
Judicial expert: university Gent Belgium
Sculpture: Academy of fine arts Heusden- Zolder BelgiumWith several national and international expositions.
Specialisation human figure: Academy of fine arts Heusden- Zolder Belgium.
Painting: Academy of fine arts Heusden- Zolder Belgium.
Forensic facial reconstruction with Betty Pat. Gatliff USA.
Advanced course facial reconstruction with Caroline Wilkinson and Richard Neave at Manchester UK.
National and international expositions of historical reconstructions (Neanderthal).
Keynote speech abstract.
Facial Reconstruction - An Art or Science?
Facial reconstruction is often considered as the most subjective - as well as one of the most controversial - technique in the field of forensic anthropology. Despite this controversy, facial reconstruction has frequently proved successful results. In the early days of facial reconstruction, scientists worked together with artists to realise the reconstruction.
Research and methodological developments continue to eliminate the subjective input and to achieve a reproducible reconstruction. On the other hand we see that facial reconstructions for historical purposes and the entertainment industry are realised by artists to humanise the result. Is an artistic input necessary, or is the facial reconstruction an art based on scientific research?
Prof. Vicki Bruce
Vicki Bruce is currently Vice Principal and Head of the College of Humanities and Social Science at the University of Edinburgh, having held chairs previously at Nottingham and Stirling. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and an Honorary Fellow of the British Psychological Society. She has conducted research into human face perception for over thirty years, and her most recent research has aimed to improve the use of facial images in identification of criminals.
Keynote speech abstract
Helping the police with their enquiries; improving the use of face images in criminal investigations
In this talk Prof. Vick Bruce will describe recent research aimed at improving the quality of composite images, constructed by witnesses to crimes, and the use of CCTV images, which may be captured at crime scenes. Both types of image create problems if taken into court as evidence, but may be extremely useful if used in the investigation stage. Difficulties with the use of both kinds of image arise because of the ways in which we perceive and remember unfamiliar faces. Recent work at the University of Stirling on face composite systems has shown advantages for using multiple composites, where available, in combination, and has also shown a major enhancement in identification rates if composites are shown in varying amounts of caricature.
Prof. Dirk Vandermeulen
Dirk Vandermeulen obtained a Masters Degree in Computer Science in 1983 and a PhD in Electrical Engineering in 1991, both at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. His initial research concentrated on image processing for computer-assisted stereotactic neurosurgery. Some of this work was implemented in a commercially available stereotactic planning system. His work then moved to medical image analysis, still with a strong focus on neurosurgical and neurological applications. He became assistant professor in 1998 and associate professor in 2004 at the medical image computing center, Leuven, where he supervises research work on model-based image analysis, with a strong emphasis on image registration based approaches. Since 2002 he is involved in applying computer vision and medical image analysis techniques to forensic imaging, more in particular cranio-facial reconstruction and biometric authentication. He published more than 70 journal papers and over a hundred conference articles.
Keynote speech abstract
Technological Advances in Computer-based Craniofacial Reconstruction
Recent computer-based approaches for craniofacial reconstruction will be presented. More in particular the "Leuven" approach, which uses a (semi)-automated method based on a statistical model (cf. talk by Tim Cootes) of the interrelationship between skull and skin surface. Other methods will be compared with it and a number of ways to validate thes procedures will be discussed.