Andrew Zisserman facts for kids

Andrew Zisserman (born in 1957) is a well-known British computer scientist. He is a professor at the University of Oxford and a leading researcher in computer vision. Computer vision is a field where computers are taught to "see" and understand images and videos, similar to how humans do. Since 2014, he has also worked with DeepMind, a company that focuses on artificial intelligence.

Education and Early Career

Andrew Zisserman studied advanced mathematics at the University of Cambridge. He then earned his PhD in theoretical physics from the Sunderland Polytechnic.

In 1984, he began his work in computer vision at the University of Edinburgh. There, he teamed up with Andrew Blake. Together, they wrote a very important book called Visual Reconstruction, published in 1987. This book is considered a key work in the field of computer vision. It introduced new ways for computers to understand 3D shapes from images.

Work at Oxford and Key Discoveries

In 1987, Andrew Zisserman moved to the University of Oxford. He joined a new robotics research group and started focusing on something called multiple-view geometry. This area of computer vision helps computers figure out the 3D shape of objects from many different pictures.

His work showed that computers could solve problems that were very hard and time-consuming for humans. For example, recovering 3D structures from many images used to take a lot of effort from highly trained experts. Andrew Zisserman's methods made this process much faster and easier for computers.

Later, he became interested in a different challenge: object recognition. This is about teaching computers to identify objects in images, like recognizing a cat or a car. This was a tough problem because even a young child could easily recognize objects, but computers struggled with it.

Important Books

Andrew Zisserman has written and edited many important articles and books in computer vision. Two of his most notable works include:

• 1987. Visual reconstruction. With Andrew Blake. This book helped computers understand 3D shapes from images.
• 2000. Multiple view geometry in computer vision. With Richard Hartley. This book is a key guide for understanding how computers can build 3D models from different camera views.

Awards and Honours

Andrew Zisserman has received many awards for his groundbreaking work. He is recognized as an ISI Highly Cited researcher, meaning his work is often referenced by other scientists.

He is the only person to have won the prestigious Marr Prize three times (in 1993, 1998, and 2003). The Marr Prize is one of the top awards in computer vision. In 2007, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. This is a very high honour for scientists in the UK.

In 2008, he received the BMVA Distinguished Fellowship. In 2013, he was given the Distinguished Researcher Award at ICCV, a major computer vision conference. Most recently, in 2017, he received the Royal Society Milner Award. This award recognized his amazing achievements in computer programming, especially his work on understanding images and creating commercial systems.