Dr. Dickinson's research interests revolve around the problem of shape perception in computer vision and, more recently, human vision. Much of his recent work focuses on perceptual grouping and its role in image segmentation and shape recovery. He's introduced numerous qualitative shape representations, and their basis in symmetry provides a focus for his perceptual grouping research. His interest in multiscale, parts-based shape representations, and their common abstraction as hierarchical graphs, has motivated his research in inexact graph indexing and matching -- key problems in object recognition, another broad focus of his research. His research has also explored many problems related to object recognition, including object tracking, vision-based navigation, content-based image retrieval, language-vision integration, and image/model abstraction.
In 1996, Dr. Dickinson received the NSF CAREER award for his work in generic object recognition, and in 2002, received the Government of Ontario Premiere's Research Excellence Award (PREA), also for his work in generic object recognition. In 2012, he received the Lifetime Research Achievement Award from the Canadian Image Processing and Pattern Recognition Society (CIPPRS). In an effort to bring together researchers from human and computer vision, he was co-chair of the 1997, 1999, 2004, and 2007 IEEE International Workshops on Generic Object Recognition (or Object Categorization), which culminated in the interdisciplinary volume, Object Categorization: Computer and Human Vision Perspectives, in 2009, and was co-chair of the 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011 International Workshops on Shape Perception in Human and Computer Vision, which culminated in the interdisciplinary volume, Shape Perception in Human and Computer Vision: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, in 2013. He was General Co-Chair of CVPR 2014 and WACV 2019, and currently serves, or has served, on the editorial boards of the journals: IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence; International Journal of Computer Vision; Computer Vision and Image Understanding; Image and Vision Computing; Graphical Models; Pattern Recognition Letters; IET Computer Vision; Frontiers in Computer Science: Computer Vision; and the Journal of Electronic Imaging. From 2017-2021, he was Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. He is also co-editor of the Synthesis Lectures on Computer Vision from Morgan & Claypool Publishers, since its inauguration in 2009. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a Fellow of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR), and an IEEE Golden Core Member.
Sven Dickinson received the B.A.Sc. degree in Systems Design Engineering from the University of Waterloo, in 1983, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, in 1988 and 1991, respectively. He is Professor and past Chair of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, and is also Vice President and Head of the new Samsung Toronto AI Research Center, which opened in May, 2018. Prior to that, he was a faculty member at Rutgers University where he held a joint appointment between the Department of Computer Science and the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science (RuCCS). His research interests revolve around the problem of shape perception in computer vision and, more recently, human vision. He has received the National Science Foundation CAREER award, the Government of Ontario Premiere's Research Excellence Award (PREA), and the Lifetime Research Achievement Award from the Canadian Image Processing and Pattern Recognition Society (CIPPRS). He was the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, from 2017-2021, currently serves on seven editorial boards, and is co-editor of the Morgan & Claypool Synthesis Lectures on Computer Vision. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a Fellow of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR), and an IEEE Golden Core Member.
Page created: Jun 1, 2009 Last modified: Jan 1, 2022 Maintained by: Sven Dickinson