Professor Anton van den Hengel is the Director of the Australian Centre for Visual Technologies at the University of Adelaide. He formed the ACVT in 2006 and it has since grown to over 40 members.
He conducts research in a variety of areas within Computer Vision, ranging from fundamental mathematical analysis to multiple technologies that have been successfully commercialised. The impact of this research is visible in the fact that it has been published in the best conferences and journals in the field.
His research income over the last 5 years is in excess of $12M and includes 5 ARC Discovery Projects, 4 ARC Linkage Projects, and 2 ARC Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities grants. He has also secured 3 Premier’s Science and Research Fund grants, each with a value over $1M and funding from the Defence CTD program.
Industry research collaborators include Google, Microsoft, Holopoint, MonkeyStack, Landmark, Carbon Planet, Apogee, Rising Sun Pictures, BAES, BHP Billiton, Sola Optical, Champion Data, Tenix, Sydac, and Bayer Cropscience.
He has had IP licensed to companies, sold outright, patented, and released into the public domain. He has formed 2 start-up companies to commercialise his research, both of which have been successful thus far. These include Snap Network Surveillance, which has now received over $3M in venture capital funding. Snap has signed a distribution agreement for the technology, run a very successful trial in a major international airport, and is in the process of raising further funding in order to expand further. The second start-up formed is Punchcard, which is commercialising the Videotrace software. Punchcard has had Commercialisation Australia funding to help develop the research into a commercial product. Videotrace has been downloaded and used by over 5,000 people to date.
He has 7 patents, all of which have gone, or are in the process of going, to international PCT stage, and have been licensed or transferred to a company that is actively exploiting the IP.
He has received a series of awards recognising the quality of his research including:
• The Pearcey Award for Innovation in ICT, 2010. This is awarded to an individual who has “taken a risk and made a difference” within the ICT industry.
• The Innovic Next Big Thing People’s Choice Award 2009 for the most exciting innovation, awarded for Videotrace.
• The Research and Development category of the South Australian iAwards, 2010 for Videotrace. The iAwards are Australia’s premier technology innovation awards program, and are presented by The Australian Information Industry Association.
• The CVPR 2010 Best Paper Prize for A. Eriksson, A. van den Hengel, Efficient Computation of Robust Low- Rank Matrix Approximations in the Presence of Missing Data using the L1 Norm, IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR ’10), San Fancisco, USA, June 2010.
He has given invited international presentations at Google (Colorado and Mountain View), Microsoft, Qualcomm, Intel (Germany and California), the University of Iowa, Technische Universität Vienna, The National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition (Chinese Academy of Sciences), and multiple seminars at Max Plank Institut für Informatik, Oxford, and Cambridge. He has held visiting positions at Oxford-Brookes, Cambridge, Universiteit van Amsterdam, and Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.
He is an Associate Editor of IPSJ Transactions on Computer Vision and Applications, and has been the Co- editor of a Special Issue of the journal Virtual Reality, Technical Committee Chair (general) of the International Conference on Digital Image Computing, Techniques and Applications 2007, Chair of the International Workshop on Parameter Estimation for Computer Vision Problems 2007, and an Area Chair for IbPRIA 2011, PSIVT2009, and IEEE DICTA 2009.
Anton’s Blog can be viewed here: Anton’s Blog
Anton’s University of Adelaide webpage can be viewed here: Anton’s Uni Webpages
