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Following is a list of my published work and technical reports that may be useful to you. Please do not hesidate to make contact if you wish to learn more about these publications or obtain copies.

Published Works

• Duff, D.J., (2011). Visual motion estimation and tracking of rigid bodies by physical simulation. PhD Thesis, University of Birmingham. [From etheses.bham.ac.uk]

  This thesis applies knowledge of the physical dynamics of objects to estimating object motion from vision when estimation from vision alone fails. It differentiates itself from existing physics-based vision by building in robustness to situations where existing visual estimation tends to fail: fast motion, blur, glare, distractors, and partial or full occlusion. A real-time physics simulator is incorporated into a stochastic framework by adding several different models of how noise is injected into the dynamics. Several different algorithms are proposed and experimentally validated on two problems: motion estimation and object tracking.
  A video summary of the visual object tracking part of this work can be found at this link (this is the same as the ICRA 2011 video).

• Duff, D.J., Mörwald, T., Stolkin, R., Wyatt, J.L. (2011). Physical simulation for monocular 3D model based tracking. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Shanghai, China. [From IEEExplore] [Preprint]

  Incorporation of physical simulation into visual tasks is extended to 3D pose tracking and the real-time object tracking case. An existing particle filter is modified and a comparison made. Different kinds of dynamics models are considered based on different approaches to adding noise to the simulator. A force-noise based approach proves best.
  A video summary can be found at this link.

• Duff, D.J., Wyatt, J.L., Stolkin, R. (2010). Motion estimation using physical simulation. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Anchorage, Alaska, 1511-1517. [From IEEExplore] [Preprint]

  We consider the task of monocular visual motion estimation from video image sequences. We hypothesise that performance on the task can be improved by incorporating an understanding of physically likely and feasible object dynamics.We test this hypothesis by incorporating a physical simulator into a least-squares estimation procedure.

• Johnson, B.W., Hautus, M.J., Duff, D.J., Clapp, W.C. (2007). Sequential processing of binaural interaural timing differences for sound source segregation and spatial localization: Evidence from event-related cortical potentials. Psychophysiology, 44(4), 541-551. [From Blackwell-Synergy]

  Dichotic pitch is a perceptual phenomenon wherein a tone is perceived when white noise is presented simultaneously to both ears of a human subject and certain correlational relationships exist between the noise presented to each ear. The phenomenon is used here to probe the brain correlates of human ability to discriminate sounds from background noise and localise those sounds.

• Duff, D.J., Guesgen, H.W. (2002). An Evaluation of buffering algorithms in fuzzy GISs. GIScience 2002, 80-92. [From SpringerLink] [Preprint - PDF]

  A fuzzy GIS is intended to capture non-strict or qualitative information in a GIS setting by allowing spatial locations to be elements in fuzzy sets (GIS = Geographic Information System, Fuzzy Set = a set whose members, rather than being in the set or not in the set, are in the set to some measure between 0 and 1). A novel and faster algorithm is presented for evaluating the fuzzy geographic neighbourhoods of multiple fuzzy sets, themselves represented as fuzzy sets.