[visionlist] EPSRC studentship at UEA

[David Connah]

PhD Position in Vision

The Colour Group at the University of East Anglia has an open, EPSRC 
funded, PhD position in the area of colour vision. The group seeks a 
talented individual who has both an interest and experience in either 
psychophysics or computer vision. Interested candidates should hold a 
bachelor degree (at least 2:1) in a scientific discipline. The post 
would be especially suitable for candidates with good mathematical 
skills, and experience in computer programming (with languages such as 
MATLAB or C).

The selected student will follow an individual programme of research as 
part of the EPSRC "Colour to Greyscale and Related Transforms" (or 
C2G-ART) research project. Both in terms of human vision and in machine 
vision it is often assumed that greyscale is simply the average colour 
response. Thinking of greyscale (or luminance) in this way causes many 
practical problems: often details in pictures or graphics are lost in 
greyscale reproductions if two different colours share the same average 
response. In the C2G-ART project we are interested in designing grey 
scale transforms which mitigate this problem (through spatial image 
analysis) as well as revisiting the question of how a human observer 
codes greyscale. Indeed, we have some preliminary evidence which 
suggests that people are easily able to translate image colours into 
greyscale even when the average (conventional greyscale) at every pixel 
is the same. Any insights we can make into how humans code greyscale 
will be used to drive algorithm development.

This project is a collaboration between the Universities of East Anglia 
(Professor Graham Finlayson and Dr David Connah) and Bradford (Dr Marina 
Bloj) and Xerox corporation in the USA. The successful applicant will be 
based at the University of East Anglia but will also have the 
opportunity to work in Bradford. There may also be an opportunity to be 
placed for a short time at Xerox.

Interested applicants can make informal enquires by either contacting 
Prof. Finlayson at graham at uea.ac.uk, or by contacting Dr. Bloj at 
M.Bloj at Bradford.ac.uk . All applicants should either be citizens of the 
UK or a member country of the European Union.

The deadline for receiving applications is Friday 15th December, with 
the post commencing at the beginning of January 2007.