Computer Vision Researcher

Dr. David R. Williamson

I am a postdoctoral researcher at NTNU's University Museum, based in Trondheim, Norway. My background is in computer vision and machine learning, especially applied to research problems in animal behaviour and development. My current research is on using computer vision and machine learning to extract information from digitised natural history specimens.

Please see my CV page for more detailed background information, or publications for downloads of my published work.

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What I Do

Computer Vision

I design and build computer vision systems, choosing appropriate hardware for an application and writing software to analyse the images or video collected from the camera system. I have experience working with 3D vision systems, and cameras and illumination in the visible spectrum, infrared, and hyperspectral.

Machine Learning

I have worked with deep learning architectures primarily to improve segmentation and classification of images. While classical computer vision is still an important tool, with sufficient training data machine learning can be incredibly powerful, providing results that would be extremely difficult and time-consuming to achieve with traditional methods.

Biology

While I am certainly not a biologist, I think they have the most interesting problems. I've worked closely with biologists on a number of projects and with varied organisms - from rats to potatoes, worms to fish. I see my role as understanding the challenges of biology well enough to be able to provide an automated system that can supplement a biologist's work, automating the tedious and repetitive tasks, allowing them to collect more and higher quality data, and providing meaningful analysis of these large datasets. In some cases, as with my work with AUVs, it is even possible to provide information that could not practically have been obtained in any other way.