Dr Gary Atkinson

• Qualifications:MSci, PhD, MInstP
• Position:Associate Professor
• Department:FET - Engineering, Design and Mathematics
• Telephone:+441173286361
• Email:Gary.Atkinson@uwe.ac.uk

About me

Gary Atkinson completed an MSci degree in physics at the University of Nottingham in 2003. Upon graduation, he moved to the University of York to study for a PhD degree in the Department of Computer Science, under the supervision of Edwin Hancock. His research was concerned with improving shape recovery algorithms and reflectance function estimation for computer vision. Most of his work involved the exploitation of the polarising properties of reflection from surfaces.

In 2007, Gary moved to the UWE Centre for Machine Vision (now part of the Bristol Robotics Laboratory) to work on face reconstruction and recognition research in collaboration with Imperial College London. He has since researched a range of areas in computer vision including 3D image analysis of plagiocephaly, industrial inspection, reflectance analysis, security/CCTV imaging, robotics and composite materials analysis. He has supervised several PhDs in the area and has published over 50 papers. He completed a postgraduate certificate programme in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education while at UWE and is fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Gary was appointed as a permanent lecturer in 2012 and has a range of teaching duties in the areas of computer vision, component inspection, and stress and dynamics theory for Engineering. In the 2019-20 academic year he took a secondment at the National Composites Centre to work in the Automation Systems group - mostly for composite part inspection. Other notable achievements include delivering a computer vision programme at the University of Qiqihar in Heilongjiang Province, China and acting as UK and EU co-convener for the 2010 International Conference and Exhibition on Biometrics Technology held in Coimbatore, India.

Gary was promoted to associate professor in 2022 and appointed programme leader for BEng Robotics in 2023.

Selected projects as PI/Co-I

AI For Quality Control - Data Driven Surface Inspection (DETI)
PoC 3.10
Aug 2020 - Aug 2022
£189k

Experimental Study of Repair of Highly Loaded Composite Structures (UWE inernal funding)
Oct 2020 - Oct 2021
£60k

Development of a machine vision-based inspection system for verification of composite materials, fibre angle measurement and defect detection (NCC)
Technology pull-through project
May 2019 - Apr 2020
£93k (£22k to UWE)

Autonomous Exploration, Data Acquisition, Processing & Visualisation (InnovateUK)
103662
Oct 2017 - Dec 2018
£276k (£84k to UWE)

Skin and Face Shape Estimation Using Photometric Stereo (EPSRC)
EP/I003061/1
Apr 2011 - May 2013
£125k (£100k to UWE)

Area of expertise

Machine Vision

​Polarization​

Mechanics for engineering

Composites

Publications

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