Joining us as a Research Student ...

[ PhD (doctorate) - 3-4 years | Masters by Research (MRes) - 1-1.5 years ]

PhD research topics in Prof. Breckon's research team relate to all aspects of computer vision and robotic sensing – the automatic understanding of images as an aspect of artificial intelligence using deep learning (i.e. "visual AI").

Supporting Resources

The Department of Computer Science hosts well-equipped labs with on-site capabilities comprising vehicle-mounted sensors (LiDAR, radar, camera, GPS/IMU), drone operations, on/off-road robotics, high-precision geo-localisation, BCI/EEG bio-signal data collection, robotic arm manipulation, X-ray security scanning, virtual reality and on-demand wide-area surveillance video feeds.

In addition Durham University hosts the UK regional supercomputer, Bede (128 NVIDIA V100 GPUs) which complements our departmental NVIDIA CUDA Compute Cluster (80+ GPUs up to NVIDIA A100) to cater for the increasing GPU compute demands of modern AI-driven research projects.

The department itself is based in the newly built Mathematical and Computer Sciences building - a £42 million, 9,160m2 state of the art teaching, learning and research facility, located on the University's Upper Mountjoy Campus.

All PhD students are allocated desk and/or lab space to support their research work and PhD student research projects are additionally supported by an annual equipment/travel allowance spanning the duration of the PhD study period.

Potential PhD Projects ...

Wide-area Surveillance & Search

Anomaly & Out-of-Distribution Detection

Addressing the challenge of automatically identifying outliers within the scene or image based on their appearance, motion or behaviour. An application-relevant challenge within both computer vision and the broader AI applicable across a wide range of multi-spectral data sources ...

Bias and Fairness in AI

Racial Bias in Face Recognition

Facial recognition is one of the most studied and developed areas of computer vision whose widespread adoption has uncovered significant performance variation across differing racial profiles leading to a research focus on racial bias within the face recognition pipeline ...

Automotive Vehicle Sensing & Perception

Perception for Autonomous Vehicles and Robotics

Addressing the key vehicle perception questions of "Where am I ?" (localisation) and "What is around me?" (scene understanding) in terms of both scene geometryand semantics with a view to all-weather performance and sensor/processing efficiency ...

Aviation & Border Security

X-ray Security Image Understanding

Addressing the complexity, variety and unconstrained nature of X-ray security imagery in terms of the variation of objects present, object orientation, inter-object occlusion and increasingly complex concealment by adversaries by leveraging recent advances spanning both computer vision and deep machine learning research.

Self-proposed PhD projects aligned to any of our current research themes or new and exciting ideas aligned our research capabilities are also very much welcomed.

Former PhD Students

Former PhD students from the team have gone on to a range of career positions including faculty positions both within the UK's Russell Group and globally, in addition to a range of positions in industry and government.

Some former PhD students from the team founded their own company called COSMONiO - in 2020 it was acquired by Intel.

Visiting PhD Students ...

We welcome applications for visiting PhD students to join us here in Durham, but you will require your own financial support or scholarship from your home nation/institution or another source.

All visiting PhD students are required to follow the formal university application process and meet the Durham University English language requirements for entry.

Our Lab Facilities

Perception Systems (Heavy Duty) Lab ...

Our laboratory facilities in the Mathematics & Computer Sciences Building, Durham University, UK (2024).