Roberto Cipolla (born 1963), ,

FREng Fellowship of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng) is an award and Scholarship, fellowship for engineers who are recognised by the Royal Academy of Engineering as being the best and brightest engineers, inventors and technologists in the UK a ...

, is a British researcher in

computer vision Computer vision is an interdisciplinary scientific field that deals with how computers can gain high-level understanding from digital images or videos. From the perspective of engineering, it seeks to understand and automate tasks that the hum ...

and Professor of Information Engineering at the

University of Cambridge , mottoeng = Literal: From here, light and sacred draughts. Non literal: From this place, we gain enlightenment and precious knowledge. , established = , other_name = The Chancellor, Masters and Schola ...

Education

Cipolla was born in Solihull, England and attended Langley School in Solihull and

Solihull Sixth Form College Solihull Sixth Form College is a further education college for students aged 16 to 19. It is situated on the outskirts of Solihull in the West Midlands and draws students from across Solihull and Birmingham. Founded in 1974, the college consis ...

. He studied engineering at the University of Cambridge and graduated in 1984 from Queens' College. He obtained an Master's (MSE) degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1985 and then was a visiting researcher at the Electrotechnical Laboratory in Tsukuba, studied Japanese at the Osaka University of Foreign Studies, and gained a second master's degree (MEng) from the

University of Electro-Communications The is a national university in the city of Chōfu, Tokyo, Japan. It specialises in the disciplines of computer science, the physical sciences, engineering and technology. It was founded in 1918 as the Technical Institute for Wireless-Commun ...

in Tokyo. Cipolla returned to England in 1988 and studied at the University of Oxford (Balliol College). In 1991 he was awarded a D.Phil. (Computer Vision) for his work on 3D reconstruction from smooth 2D contours.

Career

From 1991 to 1992 Cipolla was a Toshiba Fellow and engineer at the

Toshiba Corporation , commonly known as Toshiba and stylized as TOSHIBA, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. Its diversified products and services include power, industrial and social infrastructure syste ...

Research and Development Centre in Kawasaki, Japan. In 1992, he returned to the UK and joined the Department of Engineering at the

as a lecturer and a Fellow of Jesus College. He became a Reader in Information Engineering in 1997 and a professor in 2000. From 2007 Cipolla has also been the Director of Toshiba's Cambridge Research Laboratory and the director of the International Computer Vision Summer School which is held every year in Sicily to train young computer vision researchers.

Research and impact

Cipolla is known for his research contributions to the reconstruction, registration and recognition of three-dimensional objects from images. These include novel algorithms for the recovery of accurate 3D shape, visual localisation and tracking, and semantic segmentation and their practical application. He has authored two books: ''Active Visual Inference of Surface Shape'' in 1995 and ''Visual Motion of Curves and Surfaces'' (with Peter Giblin) in 2000; edited twelve books on computer vision and published over 400 articles in computer vision and related fields. Computer vision technology from Cipolla's research has been exploited in new products by Toshiba (face recognition for access control in varying illumination and a gesture interface for laptops) and Wayve (semantic segmentation for autonomous driving). Four companies have also been directly spun-out from Cipolla's research team: Metail (3D reconstruction and visualisation of body and clothes for online fitting room) in 2008, Zappar (tracking for Augmented Reality) in 2011, Trya (Snapfeet - 3D modelling of feet for virtual trying on of shoes and size recommendation), and Cambridge Heartwear (Atrial fibrillation detection in wearable ECG) in 2017. Cipolla became a professor at the

Royal Academy of Art The Royal Academy of Arts (RA) is an art institution based in Burlington House on Piccadilly in London. Founded in 1768, it has a unique position as an independent, privately funded institution led by eminent artists and architects. Its purpo ...

Schools, London in 2004, and since 2005 has also worked with artists and sculptors including

Anthony Gormley Sir Antony Mark David Gormley (born 30 August 1950) is a British sculptor. His works include the ''Angel of the North'', a public sculpture in Gateshead in the north of England, commissioned in 1994 and erected in February 1998; ''Another Pl ...

, whose ''Exposure'' used his algorithms to convert a small scale solid form into a geometrical system suitable for large scale fabrication''.''

Awards and honours

Cipolla was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2010; a Distinguished Fellow of the British Machine Vision Association in 2013; and a Fellow of the International Association for Pattern Recognition in 2020. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2022. He was awarded the University of Cambridge, Pilkington Teaching Prize in 2005 and the IEEE TC-PAMI Everingham Prize in 2017. He received best paper awards at the European Conference on Computer Vision in 1992 and 1996, and the

British Machine Vision Conference The British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC) is the British Machine Vision Association (BMVA) annual conference on machine vision, image processing, and pattern recognition. It is one of the major international conferences on computer vision and re ...

in 1994, 1997, 2000, 2004 and 2020.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Cipolla, Roberto 1963 births Living people Computer vision researchers Fellows of the Royal Academy of Engineering Fellows of the Royal Society Engineering professors at the University of Cambridge Fellows of Jesus College, Cambridge Alumni of the University of Cambridge Alumni of Queens' College, Cambridge University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science alumni University of Electro-Communications alumni Alumni of the University of Oxford Alumni of Balliol College, Oxford