
Doctor of Philosophy (Imperial College, London), M.Sc. (University of Edinburgh), B.Sc. (Other)
Research Overview Dr Tobias Fischer conducts interdisciplinary research at the intersection of computer vision, cognitive robotics and computational cognition. His research goal is to provide robots with perceptional abilities that allow interactions with humans in a human-like manner. To develop these perceptional abilities, Tobias believes that it is useful to study the principles used by the animal visual system. He uses these principles to develop new computer vision algorithms and validates their effectiveness in intelligent robotic systems. Research Experience Dr Fischer is the Principal Investigator of a grant entitled "Spike-based Visual Place Recognition using Intel's Loihi" funded by the Intel Neuromorphic Computing Lab. He is further co-investigator of an Amazon Research Award on "Complementarity-Aware Multi-Process Fusion for Long Term Localization". Dr Fischer was a co-author and named lead researcher of two applications for the Samsung Global Research Outreach program, which resulted in 200,000 USD commercial funding. In addition, he has been working on major research projects funded by European Union FP7 and H2020 programs, and the Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI). His papers have received two best poster awards:- Samsung AI Forum 2018 for the paper entitled "Context-aware Deep Feature Compression for High-speed Visual Tracking" (appeared at CVPR2018)
- IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision 2019 Workshop on Gaze Estimation and Prediction in the Wild for the paper entitled "RT-BENE: A Dataset and Baselines for Real-Time Blink Estimation in Natural Environments"
- Hausler, Garg, Xu, Milford & Fischer: Patch-NetVLAD: Multi-Scale Fusion of Locally Global Descriptors for Place Recognition (IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2021)
- Fischer & Milford: Event-Based Visual Place Recognition With Ensembles of Temporal Windows (IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters 2020)
- Fischer & Demiris: Computational Modelling of Embodied Visual Perspective-taking (IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems)
- Fischer, Chang & Demiris: RT-GENE: Real-Time Eye Gaze Estimation in Natural Environments (European Conference on Computer Vision ECCV2018)
- Choi et al.: Context-aware Deep Feature Compression for High-speed Visual Tracking (IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition CVPR2018)
- Chang, Fischer, Petit, Zambelli and Demiris: Learning Kinematic Structure Correspondences Using Multi-Order Similarities (IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Learning TPAMI2018 & CVPR2016)
Additional information
- Type
- Academic Honours, Prestigious Awards or Prizes
- Reference year
- 2018
- Details
- I have been awarded the renowned Queen Mary UK Best PhD in Robotics Award 2018. The competition is open to all PhD students in the field of robotics within the UK.
- Type
- Academic Honours, Prestigious Awards or Prizes
- Reference year
- 2018
- Details
- My thesis has been recognised with the Eryl Cadwaladr Davies prize for the best thesis 2017-2018 in the Electrical and Electronic Engineering Department at Imperial College London.
- Type
- Academic Honours, Prestigious Awards or Prizes
- Reference year
- 2021
- Details
- I am the senior author of the winning contribution (Patch-NetVLAD: Multi-Scale Fusion of Locally-Global Descriptors for Place Recognition; CVPR2021) at the ECCV 2020 Workshop on Long-Term Visual Localization under Changing Conditions.
- Type
- Academic Honours, Prestigious Awards or Prizes
- Reference year
- 2019
- Details
- Our Cortacero, Fischer and Demiris 2019 paper (RT-BENE: a dataset and baselines for real-time blink estimation in natural environments) won the best poster award at the ICCV Gaze Estimation and Prediction in the Wild workshop.
- Type
- Fellowships
- Reference year
- 2012
- Details
- I have been awarded a scholarship by the German National Merit Foundation (Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes), Germany's largest, oldest and most prestigious scholarship organisation. The scholarship included tuition fees, travel grants and a living allowance. The foundation supports less than 0.5% of German students.
- Fischer T, Milford M, (2020) Event-Based Visual Place Recognition With Ensembles of Temporal Windows, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 5 (4), pp. 6924-6931.
- Fischer T, Chang H, Demiris Y, (2018) RT-GENE: Real-time eye gaze estimation in natural environments, Computer Vision - ECCV 2018: 15th European Conference, Proceedings, Part X, pp. 339-357.
- Fischer T, Demiris Y, (2020) Computational modeling of embodied visual perspective taking, IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems, 12 (4), pp. 723-732.
- Garg S, Fischer T, Milford M, (2021) Where Is Your Place, Visual Place Recognition?, Proceedings of the Thirtieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-21), pp. 4416-4425.
- Prescott T, Demiris Y, Dominey P, Verschure P, Moulin-Frier C, Fischer T, Petit M, Pointeau G, Puigbo J, Pattacini U, Low S, Camilleri D, Nguyen P, Hoffmann M, Chang H, Zambelli M, Mealier A, Damianou A, Metta G, (2018) DAC-h3: A proactive robot cognitive architecture to acquire and express knowledge about the world and the self, IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems, 10 (4), pp. 1005-1022.
- Chang H, Fischer T, Petit M, Zambelli M, Demiris Y, (2018) Learning kinematic structure correspondences using multi-order similarities, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 40 (12), pp. 2920-2934.
- Choi J, Chang H, Fischer T, Yun S, Lee K, Jeong J, Demiris Y, Choi J, (2018) Context-aware deep feature compression for high-speed visual tracking, Proceedings of the 2018 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pp. 479-488.
- Choi J, Chang H, Yun S, Fischer T, Demiris Y, Choi J, (2017) Attentional correlation filter network for adaptive visual tracking, Proceedings of the 2017 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pp. 4828-4837.
- Fischer T, Demiris Y, (2016) Markerless perspective taking for humanoid robots in unconstrained environments, Proceedings of the 2016 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), pp. 3309-3316.
- Molloy T, Fischer T, Milford M, Nair G, (2021) Intelligent Reference Curation for Visual Place Recognition via Bayesian Selective Fusion, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 6 (2), pp. 588-595.
- Sensor-Based Positioning and Guidance at the Edge
PhD, Associate Supervisor
Other supervisors: Professor Michael Milford - Bio-inspired Neural Networks for Visual Place Recognition
PhD, Principal Supervisor
Other supervisors: Professor Michael Milford - Vision-based localisation during transitions between environments and high visual variability
PhD, Associate Supervisor
Other supervisors: Associate Professor Thierry Peynot, Professor Michael Milford - Global relocalization across changing conditions for metric, keyframe-based visual SLAM systems
PhD, Associate Supervisor
Other supervisors: Professor Michael Milford, Associate Professor Niko Suenderhauf