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Darren Cosker

Royal Academy of Engineering/EPSRC Research Fellow

Department of Computer Science
University of Bath
Bath
United Kingdom
BA2 7AY

D.P.Cosker(at)cs(dot)bath(dot)ac(dot)uk

I joined the Department of Computer Science at Bath University in 2007, where I hold a Royal Academy of Engineering/EPSRC Research Fellowship. I am a part of the Media Technology Research Centre, which has interests spanning Animation, Visual Interpretation and Digital Effects. I received a BSc in Computer Science with Honours from Cardiff University in 2001, and a Ph.D in Computer Science from Cardiff University in 2006. My thesis explored the synthesis and perceptual analysis of visual speech. I am also a visiting researcher at the Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing (CVSSP) at Surrey University.

My research interests lie in the convergence of Computer Vision, Computer Graphics and Psychology - particularly in relation to human motion analysis and synthesis.

EPSRC Network on Vision and Language

EPSRC has just awarded funding for a new network on Vision and Language. The first newsletter - which includes more information - may be found here.

BMVA Symposium of Facial Analysis and Animation

The BMVA Symposium on Facial Analysis and Animation was held in Edinburgh on June 10th. Details on the even can be found at http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/faa/.

EngD in Digital Entertainment

There are currently multiple EngD opportunities in our research group in the area of Digital Entertainment, including movie effects post-production and video games. An EngD is a 4 year degree based primarily in Industry on a problem jointly supervised by both Industry and Academia. There are currently EngD opportunities with a number of internationally leading companies, including Lionhead, Bizarre Creations, Framestore, Frontier and Naturalmotion. An EngD gives you the perfect opportunity to work on cutting edge problems with both significant Industrial and Academic relevance.

You can find out more details at our current EngD website, or you can send me an email if you are interested in applying or finding out more.

Selected Publications


C. Charron, Y. A. Hicks, P. Hall and D. Cosker, "Incremental Learning of Dynamical Models of Faces", In Proc. BMVC 2009.


L. Benedikt, D. Cosker, D. Marshall and P. L. Rosin, "Assessing the Uniqueness and Permanence of Facial Actions for Use in Biometric Applications", IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics - Part A: Systems and Humans, 2009 (in press).

D. Cosker and J. Edge, "Laughing, Crying, Sneezing and Yawning: Automatic Voice Driven Animation of Non-Speech Articulations", In Proc. of Computer Animation and Social Agents (CASA), 2009

Short Version

There is various press related to this work, including a report on the New Scientist website.
Face images

E. Krumhuber, A. Manstead, D. Cosker, D. Marshall and P. L. Rosin, "Effects of Dynamic Attributes of Smiles in Human and Synthetic Faces: A Simulated Job Interview Setting", Journal of Non-Verbal Behaviour, vol. 33, no. 1, pp. 1-15, 2009.
BTAS

L. Benedikt, D. Cosker, D. Marshall and P. L. Rosin, "3D Facial Gestures in Biometrics: from Feasibility Study to Application", In Proc. of IEEE International Conference on Biometrics Theory, Applications and Systems, pp 1-6, 2008.
mocap


D. Cosker, C. Holt, D. Mason, G. Whatling, D. Marshall and P. L. Rosin, "Automatic Audio Driven Animation of Non-Linguistic Vocalisations", In Proc. of CMBBE 2008.

Download: Poster

There is various press about this work, including a report on the New Scientist website.
Face Alignment

L. Benedikt, V. Kajic, D. Cosker, D. Marshall and P.L. Rosin, "Facial Dynamics in Biometric Identification", In Proc. of Britsh Machine Vision Conference (BMVC), 2008.
gav modes

D. Cosker, R. Borkett, D. Marshall and P. L. Rosin, "Towards Automatic Performance Driven Animation Between Multiple Types of Facial Model", IET Computer Vision, Vol. 2, No. 3, pages 129-141. 2008.
Handshake_Examples
 Y. Zheng, Y. Hicks, D. Marshall and D. Cosker, "Generating Human Interactive Behaviours using the Windowed Viterbi Algorithm", In Proc. of the Third International Conference on Computer Graphics Theory and Applications (GRAPP), 2008

Videos: Push, Pull, Handshake
Face with dynamics L. Benedikt, E. Krumhuber, A. Calvert, D. Cosker, P. Rosin and D. Marshall, "Using Dynamic 3D Facial Data to Create 3D Appearance Models of Facial Action Units", ACM SIGGRAPH 2007 (poster), San Diego, 2007.

thumbnail

D. Cosker, S. Roy, P. L. Rosin, D. Marshall, "Remapping Animation Parameters between Multiple Types of Facial Model", Lecture Notes in
Computer Science (LNCS), Volume 4418, pages 365-378, Springer, 2007.

Videos: Overview, Simple_Morph_Target_Mapping_Example
Smile trajectory E. Krumhuber, A. Manstead, D. Cosker, P.L.Rosin and A.D. Marshall, "Facial Dynamics as Indicators of Trustworthiness and Cooperative Behaviour", Emotion, Vol 7, No 4, pp 730-735, 2007.

Videos: Overview. Smile_Analysis - this curve is then manipulated to create 'fake' or 'genuine' smiles.
virtual friend Z.Zheng, Y. A. Hicks, D. Cosker, D. Marshall and J. A. Chambers, “Virtual Friend: Tracking and Generating Natural Interactive Behaviours in Real Video”, In Proc. of IEEE International Conference on Signal Processing (ICSP), Gullin, China, 2006.

Videos: Push_Video_Example
Trajectory synthesis D. Cosker, D. Marshall, P. Rosin, S. Paddock, S. Rushton, ``Towards Perceptually Realistic Talking Heads: Models, Metrics and McGurk'', ACM Transactions on Applied Perception, vol. 2, no. 3, pp 270-285, 2005.

Videos: Synthetic_McGurk_1, (Tuple - Synthetic_Clip="Dead", Audio_Clip="Mat", Perception="Gnat")
The full set of videos used in this paper can be obtained by contacting me.
BSS W. Wang, D. Cosker, Y. Hicks, S. Sanei, and J. A. Chambers, ``Video Assisted Speech Source Separation'',
In Proc. IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) 2005 Philadelphia, USA.
Trajectory Synthesis D. Cosker, D. Marshall, P. Rosin, Y.A. Hicks, ``Speech Driven Facial Animation using a Hidden Markov Co-articulation Model'', In Proc. of IEEE International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR), Vol. 1, pp 128-131, 2004.

Videos: Example_1, Example_2 (both example videos generated using only speech), Tracking_Example
Annotated audio-visual training data used in this paper can be obtained by contacting me.
Hierarchy D. Cosker, D. Marshall, P. Rosin, Y.A. Hicks,``Speech Driven Facial Animation using a Hierarchical Model'', IEE Vision, Image and Signal Processing, Vol. 151 (4) pp. 314-321, 2004.
System overview D. Cosker, "Animation of a Hierarchical Appearance Based Facial Model and Perceptual Analysis of Visual Speech", Ph.D Thesis, Cardiff University, 2005

Full publication list is being updated and will be available soon.