News & Events
Newly Established Durham Centre for Digital Humanities (DCDH) Launches with Interdisciplinary Research and Collaboration
We are delighted to announce the launch of the Durham Centre for Digital Humanities (DCDH), a new interdisciplinary centre at Durham University dedicated to exploring the relationships between digital technologies, the a…
Exploring the Effects of Asynchronous Collaborative Art in VR with PaintBranch
SN Computer Science
ArtContext: Contextualizing Artworks with Open-Access Art History Articles and Wikidata Knowledge through a LoRA-Tuned CLIP Model
arXiv
E-M3RF: An Equivariant Multimodal 3D Re-assembly Framework
arXiv
Samuel Waugh's N8 CIR Summer Internship leads to Development of new AI Tool for Art Contextualisation
This summer, Durham University Computer Science student Samuel Waugh completed a research internship with the N8 Centre of Excellence in Computationally Intensive Research (N8 CIR) under my supervision. Over the course o…
Welcome Professor Alessio Del Bue to Durham — Strengthening Our Collaboration
We are delighted to welcome Professor Alessio Del Bue to Durham University in his newly conferred role as Honorary Professor in the Department of Computer Science. His appointment marks an exciting new chapter in our lon…
CVPR 2025 Outstanding Reviewer Award
Stuart James has been recognised as an Outstanding Reviewer at CVPR 2025 in Nashville, USA.
ReAssembleNet: Learnable Keypoints and Diffusion for 2D Fresco Reconstruction
ICCV
Maps from Motion (MfM): Generating 2D Semantic Maps from Sparse Multi-view Images
3DV
PaintBranch: Asynchronous Collaborative Art in Virtual Reality
VRW
Re-assembling the past: The RePAIR dataset and benchmark for real world 2D and 3D puzzle solving
NeurIPS
6DGS: 6D Pose Estimation from a Single Image and a 3D Gaussian Splatting Model
ECCV
IFFNeRF: Initialisation Free and Fast 6DoF pose estimation from a single image and a NeRF model
ICRA
GANzzle++: Generative approaches for jigsaw puzzle solving as local to global assignment in latent spatial representations
PRL
Positional diffusion: Graph-based diffusion models for set ordering
PRL
PRAGO: Differentiable multi-view pose optimization from objectness detections
3DV
Towards the Reusability and Compositionality of Causal Representations
CRL
ArtAI4DS: AI Art and its Empowering Role in Digital Storytelling
IFIP-ICEC
Interactive Digital Storytelling Navigating the Inherent Currents of the Diasporic Mind
ICIDS
New position at Durham University
As of 1st September 2023, I will be taking up a position as Assistant Professor in Visual Computing at Durham University working in the VIViD group. This marks a major transition for me, as I move from being a contract-b…
Two New EU Projects kicking off 2023: DCitizens & BoSS
This year we see the kick-off of two new projects Bauhaus of the Seas (BOSS) and DCitizens. Two projects focused on citizens and communities with very exciting prospects. Check them out!
Inclusive Digital Storytelling: Artificial Intelligence and Augmented Reality to re-centre Stories from the Margins
ICIDS
Connected to the people: Social Inclusion & Cohesion in Action through a Cultural Heritage Digital Tool
CSCW
Positional Diffusion: Ordering Unordered Sets with Diffusion Probabilistic Models
arXiv
You are here! Finding position and orientation on a 2D map from a single image: The Flatlandia localization problem and dataset
arXiv
Locality-aware subgraphs for inductive link prediction in knowledge graphs
PRL
Writing with (Digital) Scissors: Designing a Text Editing Tool for Assisted Storytelling using Crowd-Generated Content
ICIDS
PoserNet: Refining Relative Camera Poses Exploiting Object Detections
ECCV
Geolocation of Cultural Heritage using Multi-View Knowledge Graph Embedding
ICPRW
GANzzle: Reframing jigsaw puzzle solving as a retrieval task using a generative mental image
ICIP
Emerging Strategies in Asymmetric Sketch Interactions for Object Retrieval in Virtual Reality
IMET
Multi-view 3D Objects Localization from Street-level Scenes
ICIAP
Perceived realism of pedestrian crowds trajectories in VR
VRST
Square peg, round hole: A case study on using Visual Question & Answering in Games
CHI Play
Amnesia in the Atlantic: an AI Driven Serious Game on Marine Biodiversity
IFIP-ICEC
Artificial Intelligence and Art History: A Necessary Debate?
Histoire de l'art
Mixing Modalities of 3D Sketching and Speech for Interactive Model Retrieval in Virtual Reality
IMX
Consistent Mesh Colors for Multi-View Reconstructed 3D Scenes
arXiv
LIGHTS: LIGHT Specularity Dataset for specular detection in Multi-view
ICIP
Three great videos about the pilot locations of MEMEX
We recently published three videos on the pilot locations, Paris, Barcelona and Spain, of the MEMEX Project. This challenging collaboration effort came together during the second wave of COVID so a massive effort was nee…
Two positions on MEMEX Project (Post Doc and Engineer)
We have two (exciting) positions to join us on the MEMEX EU Project! One engineer to coordinate with the project consortium to develop an innovative app exposing Cultural Heritage and project participant stories. The sec…
New PhD Position Available in Visual Reasoning!
Exciting news, for me and possibly for you! This post marks my first PhD call where I will be leading the research direction of the successful candidate in collaboration with Alessio Del Bue (IIT) and Sebastiano Vascon (…
And it begins... MEMEX
Today we had our Kick-off Meeting for the MEMEX EU Project here is the abstract:
Machine Learning for Cultural Heritage: A Survey
PRL
Review in a week*
For a long time now, I have been reviewing articles at a variety of journals and conferences, which is “usually” tracked within publons. While I try hard to make sure that I get reviews completed before the d…
Mixing realities for sketch retrieval in Virtual Reality
VRCAI
re-OBJ: Jointly learning the foreground and background for object instance re-identification
ICIAP · Best Student Paper Award
Augmenting datasets for Visual Question and Answering for complex spatial reasoning
CVPRW
Autonomous 3D reconstruction, mapping and exploration of indoor environments with a robotic arm
IEEE RAL
Organising VisArt @ ECCV'18!
This year I’m very excited to be organising the workshop VISART IV with several other great chairs: - Alessio Del Bue, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT); - Leonardo Impett, EPFL & Biblioteca Hertziana, Max…
Visual Graphs from Motion (VGfM): Scene understanding with object geometry reasoning
ACCV
Multi-view Aggregation for Color Naming with Shadow Detection and Removal
IPAS · Best Paper Award
3D Sketching for Interactive Model Retrieval in Virtual Reality
Expressive
Model Retrieval by 3D Sketching in Immersive Virtual Reality
IEEE VR
A lesson in stopping
For a long time now I have pushed my self to run further, faster and harder; this year has been the pinnacle of that with some of my heaviest running months and one of my lowest. Resulting in running over 1000miles in a…
Texture Stationarization: Turning Photos into Tileable Textures
I’m very proud to announce our recent paper at Eurographics 2017 in Lyon today the spotlight was showcased, with narration by Joep Moritz. If you didn’t get the chance to see it, an extended version is now av…
Leaving UCL meal with Tim's group
After being with Tim Weyrich’s group for almost a year and a half yesterday we had our final group lunch and a cheeky beer. It has been great working with everyone at UCL, not just in the immediate group and in tha…
Texture Stationarization: Turning Photos into Tileable Textures
Eurographics
Digital Photographic Practices as Expressions of Personhood and Identity: Variations Across School Leavers and Recent Retirees
Visual Studies
Transferring old book image style to real world photos
Style transfer has become a popular area of research and with public applications such as Prisma based on Neural Style Transfer [Gatys'15]. Earlier this week I wanted to answer the question does it really work for unders…
Cheddar Gorge Relish Run
As I continue my crazy running activities I take another shot at the Relish Run Cheddar Gorge half marathon. A great route that takes you up over the hills surrounding Cheddar and past the trig point with views over West…
San Francisco Second Half Marathon
I've been running for a few years now, doing as many runs as I can a year. Granted my training routine isn't very vigorous, but just doing the run is great fun. After attending SIGGRAPH this year, I passed through San Fr…
Getting back to books
When I was younger I never got into reading novels sadly. I have tried throughout my adult life to try to get into them, but sadly it is always a challenge to stick with them. Often I find the demands of my work a massiv…
29 going on 30
A mini-celebration of reflection as I hit my 29th year floating around the sun. Although I may not of achieved everything I have set out todo in this decade I have a lot of achievements both career / academically and lif…
Working with the British Library Dataset
Earlier this year Tim Weyrich directed me onto a dataset published by the British Library and since then my research has focused heavily around this. Within Computer Vision it is unusual to get a large dataset not skewed…
Moving to Jekyll
After many (and many) years of using dynamic CMS, I have decided to take the plunge and move to an old school methodology -- static websites. Well when I say "static", I mean offline generated site, I'm not crazy after a…
Evolutionary Data Purification for Social Media Classification
ICPR
Towards Sketched Visual Narratives for Retrieval
SketchX
Visual Narratives: Free-hand Sketch for Visual Search and Navigation of Video
PhD Thesis
Why I am a resolution junky
I have been coding for many years now (scarily > 15 years), I have always aimed to get higher and higher resolution screens or alternatively multiple screens. Sadly as mentioned in an earlier blog post the comput…
New Toys Sept’14 Part 1 of 2 – BenQ BL2710PT 27” WQHD
After having my beast of a desktop replacement laptop (ASUS n73sv) for a few years now the screen has become a bit temperamental. This and the fact I am using Lenovo Yoga2 Pro ultra book more and more (due to portability…
libSVM linear kernel normalisation
I have used a variety of tools for binary, multiclass and even incremental SVM problems, today I found something quite nice in binary case for libSVM, although potentially a source of confusion.
Wolfram Programming Cloud Beta goes live
Wolfram Alpha is incredibly useful source of information, when it was announced they would produce a flexible programming cloud it was of great interest to me. With the release I jumped on to see what it was like.
Intro to Climbing @CraggyIsland
For the last couple of weeks I have been taking an intro to climbing at Craggy Island in Guildford. I have previously been bouldering at Surrey Sports Park and a Church in Bristol, but have never been bothered to commit…
10k Colour Run @Weston-super-Mare
Recently I completed a 10k fun run in my home town. The event was in aid of Weston Hospice care, I don’t have any direct relation with it is a good cause to support so raised a little money and went along to get covered…
Look at that text isn’t it tiny oh its on the Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro!
A few weeks back I got my grubby little hands on a Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro i7 8GB 512GB SSD-HD, this was up against the Dell XPS 13 and the Sony Vaio Pro. I have had a play on the Vaio, that is a nice piece of kit, absolutely…
Visualise the output of .dot file using GraphViz / dot (Linux)
Something I managed to miss from earlier Graph related posts, was how to visualise the graph using GraphViz
Windows Phone great platform but not quite there
Choosing a Phone platform is a big issue, people spend vast amount of time contemplating what to choose and which phone to have. I recently got the opportunity to explore Windows Phone as an alternative to Android, I hav…
Getting to grips with the Facebook API with PHP and JavaScript SDK Part 1
For a research project we are working with peoples Facebook data amongst other social data, this required writing an application to inspect user content utilising the public API. This process shone some light on the priv…
Running a process in the background from php
So earlier this week I had a little problem with Apache/PHP killing the task I had running. So after looking around a little online I got some hints and finally came to the conclusion on this line:
Read (aka Listened) Books of 2013
2013 I really found my stride with audiobooks, having started the year previous I listened got through a collection of books averaging one complete book a month for the year. This may not seem like much, I know a lot of…
Enhanced Digital Literacy by Multi-modal Data Mining of the Digital Lifespan
DE
Interactive Video Asset Retrieval using Sketched Queries
CVMP
Particle Filtering approach to salient video object localization
ICIP
ReEnact: Sketch based Choreographic Design from Archival Dance Footage
ICMR
Admixed Portrait: Design Intervention to Prompt Reflection on Being Online as a New Parent
DIS
Gradient Field HOG Update
Every so often we get contacted about algorithms our group (lead by Dr. John Collomosse) have implemented. Due to a recent request I have updated the files downloadable for the implementation of Gradient Field HOG, littl…
VirtualBox Windows 8.1 Upgrade -- don't forget the settings
I run a few VM's on my workstation to perform different tasks one is a Windows 8 dev box, I finally got around to upgrading it. So checked all updates were done and then went to the store to get an error message I think…
SAFESEH and Visual Studio
Many of us dont hugely enjoy recompiling libaries. I for one who only use 3 large and a handful of small, causing me to cringe at the idea of recompiling to include a new feature or worse a new platform.
About.me increasing popularity
As soon as about.me launched I got a profile on the site, a shameful admission to some but to me is interesting to see how new sites work and how they can be utilised. For a long time though it has had little attraction…
Surface (1) RT 8.1 Upgrade Tips
This week I finally did the Windows 8.1 update on my Surface RT 1st generation, it went well took a while so be prepared for a couple of ours process to update your tablet but, it doesn't much user engagement to complete…
Office 365 P1 Plan Allows Additional SharePoint Storage!
For a long time I have been thinking about migrating from Office 365 SMB to the enterprise plan, the only reason I see to do this is to be able to buy additional storage, but now you seem to be able to on the P1 Plan! I…
My Stickmen look like a 5 year old (possibly younger) drew them
If you have seen any of my research it heavily involves crazy little stick figures or badly hand drawn stick figures or horses. Sadly after 3 years of PhD my ability to draw via a computer or by hand has not improved as…
Visual Studio 2013 breaks VirtualBox due to Hyper-V conflict
After installing the preview with all its bells and whistles including Hyper-V for Windows Phone development(I think) I found that I got array of network errors and then the killer VT-x is not available
Microsoft decide the UK doesn’t exist in Windows 8.1 Update
As you may of gathered from previous posts, it seems it isn’t possible to install the update on a UK surface. The only way that is rumoured to work is to flash the device and select either German or French in the setup.…
Surface RT 8.1, maybe I am impatient!
After seeing the post come up in my sad to say Facebook feed went on to download the 8.1 update for my Surface RT. Am a little confused by how this error is to be fixed but still am a little disappointed.
C++ + Visual Studio 2012 (VS2012) + Win8 , converting projects up some conflicts I found
Having loved the ability to compile VS2010 projects inside the VS2012 shell as a way of delaying the update, I thought it was time to stop delaying ( 1 Year late ).
Rotor Style Skeleton Browser
A while ago I found a paper from a research project called MediaMill. They presented a technique for viewing different facets of video content in a windmill fashion. Recently I was exploring how we could visualise skelet…
S3 Push and Pull – Backup a EC2 Instance or just some data
I stumbled across a great tool to just push and pull data from an S3 bucket last week wrapped into one light weight executable. Requires .NET 2.0 or Mono so on Linux becomes a little heavy weight.
Boost Graph Visualisation using dot and Graphviz
Debugging graphs can sometimes be annoying a useful way is to visualise it. No problem Boost has not only a graph solution but a way to visualise it too.
The old Windows 8 argument on a non-touch laptop
We have already heard many arguments about Windows 8 with and without touch, the new “metro” UI and the missing start button. I dont intend to add anything to this I think it really comes down to your personal preference…
mojoPortal Inline Editing, easy user content editing!
I have always liked the style of mojoPortal making it easy to understand what you are editing. The approach is quite in contrast to other CMS where you end up with a front house and back house style system, mojoPortal do…
Windows Intune a must for SMB administrators
With the push of large amount of cloud services from many different vendors it takes time to explore and see what is now available. Today I did a brief excursion into Windows Intune.
Performance I just don’t understand Win 2008 vs Win 2012 on AWS
After having some weird connection issues over the last week since migrating my blog and portfolio to an alternative configuration instance based on Windows Server 2008 I decided to do a load test to see whether this was…
Kingdom of Drakkar Maps!
Everyone has games they played from their childhood, well that iconic game for me was Drakkar. Mario, Sonic get honourable mentions but Drakkar from 12 to my early 20’s. At Christmas I decided to bring to my walls a litt…
Looking at the clouds and wondering which way to go
After many discussions about the contrast of running a VPS on a host provided dedicated server and running an Instance in the cloud this weekend I decided to explore and found that actually there aren't bad options avail…
Markov Random Fields for Sketch based Video Retrieval
ICMR
Alternative Boost Graph Construction based on defining edges independently
So you may of seen previous posts on Boost Graph construction, here I present an easier way of constructing the graph but at a performance cost. This shouldn’t be used if can be avoided, but it may be useful if you want…
Skeletons from Sketches of Dancing Poses paper for VL/HCC 2012 Demo
I have put together a quick demo for the upcoming conference. Sadly I wont be there to present the work but the main author Manuel J. Fonseca from IST is going to be there.
OpenCV: Brox Optical Flow Sample, possible fix
I had some fun getting OpenCV with CUDA support and the demo to work that required OpenGL that for some yet unknown reason would not connect in properly. So I thought I would share my experience.
Boost Dijkstra Shortest Path Example utilising backtracking from target
Often API documentation can be difficult to follow and your memory might fail for algorithms you learnt in school, so a simple example often explains how to use a function. Well unless you are very familiar with the way…
Looking at Optical Flow in real scenarios
In many scenarios knowing how an object moves between frames is important, for example if you are trying to separate moving objects from the background or to calculate the speed of a tennis ball. Generally within Compute…
Pixel Tracking! (Dog Tracking)
Ever wonder what your dog gets up to at home? Well I do a lot, this weekend I decided to setup a temporary solution to see what my dog does. Here are some day 1 results, only the masks to protect my dogs(Pixel) and my pr…
Olympics 2012 Table Tennis Round 4–My Olympic Experience!
Sadly this pushed my lens to the limits and have been a little lazy in the post processing just cropped a few but enjoy…
Boost Serialization fast and easy Serialization of objects for C++ to XML,Text or Binary
While coding I always try to learn new ways of writing old things. There are many many libraries out there for C++ all work in different ways, but the library I fell in love with is Boost. Ignoring the massive extension…
Visual Studio 12 Performance Analysis
Since the Visual Studio 2012 RTM came out I have been experimenting with the different features. Now this may of existed in previous versions(although not as pretty), but this is quite a nice little tool for understandin…
Easy tool for evaluation of images datasets, where recall isn’t an option
Often when doing image dataset evaluation you want a quick easy way to either see how different descriptors perform or just get an evaluation measure for your system. Well I have created a tool to be able to do the forme…
IDE Experiments
I have been a Visual Studio user for many years so trying out Visual Studio 11, isn’t a big surprise. I like the restyle that VS11 has received doesn’t encourage me to run out and get add-on to get VS theme add-on. As fo…
Diablo 3, oh how you have let me down :(
I have been looking forward to Diablo 3 for a long time, I enjoyed playing a bit of the beta but didn’t want to play too much for fear of spoiling the game. Since coming out I haven't had much time to play with travellin…
Where to publish…
I have some work to submit to a conference in information retrieval or computer vision conference, originally planning on submitting to Asian Conference on Computer Vision(ACCV). ACCV is hosted in Korea, that would be an…
Map a point within a triangle from low dimensions to high
The work I have been doing recently is to explore a mapping from a low dimensional space(10d) to a high dimensional space(160d). Although is not a particularly common problem is something that requires a little thinking.
Windows 8 on Low Res Netbook (with Touch...ish) ... continued
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Diablo III Release Date
The release date for Diablo 3 is nore confirmed as 15th May. I remember playing this as a kid so is nice to see another game I loved coming together for a sequal.
Retrieval Match Heat map, using HTML5
Taking inspiration from some work my supervisor did on the Digital Dance Archives website, exploiting a match heat map can help identify matches within a video.
Visual Information Retrieval Index Service
Have finally got around to writing a service to handle my index. It may seem strange it has taken so long to do this but, performance often doesn't take much of effect in my work. As long as the search is performed in a…
Windows 8 on Low Res Netbook (with Touch...ish)
I played around with Window 8 consumer preview for a while on a vm on a high-end laptop, but after a while got bored of the lack of touch support so decided would give it a try on my Asus EeePC with Swival Touch Screen.…
Welcome to Lisbon
I am currently on a mini-internship for 4 weeks in INESC-ID in Lisbon, Portugal. I have now been here a few nights and have yesterday moved into the IST student accommodation. I have done some exploring so thought would…
MojoPortal module headings not including h2 solution
I have been gradually upgrading MojoPortal on my www.stuartjames.info site for quite a while now, except for a few migrations the database has remained intact. I came across an interesting problem where sometime over the…
Skeletons from Sketches of Dancing Poses
VL/HCC
Annotated Free-hand Sketches for Video Retrieval using Object Semantics and Motion
MMM
A short excursion to Paris (France)
Went on a short pre-christmas trip to Paris for a few days, thought I would share a few of my experiences. The first thing to note in Paris is the cost, plan for expensive meals if you go you will really struggle to avoi…
gcc compiler dynamic array declaration without warning
I demonstrate for one of Prof Richard Bowden's modules on C programming for first year Electronic Engineering students. Recently one of the tasks given to students was read in a matrix, multiply and write it out. To star…
Annotated Sketches for Intuitive Video Retrieval
BMVA Workshop