Dr Nicholas Costen

Academic and professional qualifications

The Manchester Metropolitan University
Postgraduate Certicate in Education (Higher Education).

The University of Aberdeen
Ph.D., Mathematics and Psychology. "Spatial Frequencies and Face Recognition".

The University of Reading
M.Sc., Research Methods in Psychology.

The Queen's College, The University of Oxford
M.A., Experimental Psychology.

Fellow of the Higher Education Academy

Fellow of the British Computer Society 

Member of the IEEE

Previous employment

08/2001-08/2010 Senior Lecturer in Computing,
School of Computing, Mathematics and Digital Technology, The Manchester Metropolitan University.

07/1997-08/2001 Research Associate, Wolfson Image Analysis Unit,
Division of Imaging Science and Biomedical Engineering The University of Manchester.

10/1994-07/1997 Research Associate, Human Information Processing Laboratory,
Advanced Telecommunications Research Kyoto, Japan.

09/1991-10/1995 Research Assistant, Department of Mathematical Sciences, The University of Aberdeen.

Other academic service (administration and management)

School Health and Safety Representative, School of Computing, Mathematics and Digital Technology

Publications

• Featured Works

  AK. Davison, C. Lansley, N. Costen, K. Tan, MH. Yap (2018). SAMM: A Spontaneous Micro-Facial Movement Dataset. IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing. 9(1), pp.116-129.

• Journal articles

  M. Benouis, L. Mostefai, N. Costen, M. Regouid (2021). ECG based biometric identification using one-dimensional local difference pattern. Biomedical Signal Processing and Control. 64, pp.102226-102226.

  M. Regouid, M. Touahria, M. Benouis, N. Costen (2019). Multimodal biometric system for ECG, ear and iris recognition based on local descriptors. Multimedia Tools and Applications. 78(16), pp.22509-22535.

  AK. Davison, C. Lansley, N. Costen, K. Tan, MH. Yap (2018). SAMM: A Spontaneous Micro-Facial Movement Dataset. IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing. 9(1), pp.116-129.

  J. Darby, B. Li, N. Costen (2014). Tracking object poses in the context of robust body pose estimates. COMPUTER VISION AND IMAGE UNDERSTANDING. 127, pp.57-72.

  J. Darby, B. Li, N. Costen, I. Loram, E. Hodson-Tole (2013). Estimating skeletal muscle fascicle curvature from B-mode ultrasound image sequences. IEEE Trans Biomed Eng. 60(7), pp.1935-1945.

  H. Fang, N. Costen, N. Butcher, K. Lander (2012). Modeling the effect of motion at encoding and retrieval for same and other race face recognition. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics). 7403 LNCS, pp.184-190.

  PJ. Harding, EF. Hodson-Tole, R. Cunningham, I. Loram, N. Costen (2012). Automated detection of skeletal muscle twitches from B-mode ultrasound images: An application to motor neuron disease. Proceedings - International Conference on Pattern Recognition. pp.2630-2633.

  J. Darby, EF. Hodson-Tole, N. Costen, ID. Loram (2012). Automated regional analysis of B-mode ultrasound images of skeletal muscle movement. J Appl Physiol (1985). 112(2), pp.313-327.

  N. Butcher, K. Lander, H. Fang, N. Costen (2011). The effect of motion at encoding and retrieval for same- and other-race face recognition. Br J Psychol. 102(4), pp.931-942.

  J. Darby, B. Li, N. Costen (2010). Tracking known and unknown human activites. 4th International Conference on Cognitive Systems, CogSys 2010.

  N. Poh, C-H. Chan, J. Kittler, S. Marcel, C. McCool, et al. E. Argones-Rúa, JL. Alba-Castro, M. Villegas, R. Paredes, V. Struc, N. Pavesic, AA. Salah, H. Fang, N. Costen. (2010). An Evaluation of Video-to-Video Face Verification. IEEE Trans. Inf. Forensics Secur.. 5, pp.781-801.

  J. Darby, B. Li, N. Costen (2010). Tracking human pose with multiple activity models. Pattern Recognit.. 43, pp.3042-3058.

  J. Darby, B. Li, N. Costen, D. Fleet, N. Lawrence (2009). Backing Off: Hierarchical Decomposition of Activity for 3D Novel Pose Recovery. Procedings of the British Machine Vision Conference 2009.

  H. Fang, N. Costen (2009). From Rank-N to Rank-1 Face Recognition Based on Motion Similarity. Procedings of the British Machine Vision Conference 2009.

  J. Darby, B. Li, N. Costen (2008). Activity Classification for Interactive Game Interfaces. Int. J. Comput. Games Technol.. 2008, pp.751268:1-751268:1.

  M. Brown, NP. Costen (2005). Exploratory basis pursuit classification. Pattern Recognition Letters. 26(12), pp.1907-1915.

  M. Brown, NP. Costen, S. Akamatsu (2004). Efficient calculation of the complete optimal classification set. Proceedings - International Conference on Pattern Recognition. 2, pp.307-310.

  NP. Costen, M. Brown, S. Akamatsu (2004). Sparse models for gender classification. Proceedings - Sixth IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition. pp.201-206.

  NP. Costen, TF. Cootes, CJ. Taylor (2002). Compensating for ensemble-specific effects when building facial models. Image and Vision Computing. 20(9-10), pp.673-682.

  NP. Costen, TF. Cootes, GJ. Edwards, CJ. Taylor (2002). Automatic extraction of the face identity-subspace. Image and Vision Computing. 20(5-6), pp.319-329.

  I. Craw, N. Costen, T. Kato, S. Akamatsu (1999). How Should We RepresentFaces for Automatic Recognition?. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell.. 21, pp.725-736.

  DM. Parker, NP. Costen (1999). One extreme or the other or perhaps the golden mean? Issues of spatial resolution in face processing. Current Psychology. 18(1), pp.118-127.

  NP. Costen, DM. Parker, I. Craw (1996). Effects of high-pass and low-pass spatial filtering on face identification. Percept Psychophys. 58(4), pp.602-612.

  NP. Costen, J. Shepherd, H. Ellis, IG. Craw (1994). Masking of Faces by Facial and Non-Facial Stimuli. Visual Cognition. 1, pp.227-251.

  NP. Costen, DM. Parker, I. Craw (1994). Spatial content and spatial quantisation effects in face recognition. Perception. 23(2), pp.129-146.

• Chapters in books

  AL. Mölder, S. Drury, N. Costen, G. Hartshorne, S. Czanner (2016). Three Dimensional Visualisation of Microscope Imaging to Improve Understanding of Human Embryo Development. In: Visualization in Medicine and Life Sciences III. Springer International Publishing, pp.249-264.

  H. Fang, NP. Costen, P. Grant, M. Chen (2011). Advances in Moving Face Recognition. R. Qahwaji, R. Green, H. Evor. In: Applied Signal and Image Processing: Multidisciplinary Advancements. IGWE Global,

  DM. Parker, NP. Costen (2001). One extreme or the other, or perhaps the golden mean? Issues of spatial resolution in face processing. H. Ellis, N. MacRae. In: Validation in Psychology: Research Perspectives. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, pp.151-162.

• Conferences

  C. Wilcox, S. Djahel, V. Giagos, K. Welsh, N. Costen (2023). A New Semantic Similarity Scheme for More Accurate Identification in Medical Data. In: 2023 IEEE International Smart Cities Conference (ISC2). 24/9/2023.

  AL. Molder, G. Hartshorne, S. Czanner, N. Costen, S. Drury (2017). Image analysis of human embryos grown in vitro as a new non-invasive tool to determine embryo health. Geneva, Switzerland, 2/7/2017.

  C-C. Ng, MH. Yap, N. Costen, B. Li (2015). Will Wrinkle Estimate the Face Age?. In: 2015 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics. City Univ Hong Kong, Hong Kong, PEOPLES R CHINA, 9/10/2015. pp.2418-2423.

  J. Darby, B. Li, R. Cunningham, N. Costen (2012). Object localisation via action recognition. In: Proceedings - International Conference on Pattern Recognition. pp.817-820.

  PJ. Harding, M. Topsom, N. Costen (2011). Mutual Information Based Gesture Recognition. In: CAIP (1). pp.571-578.

  N. Poh, C-H. Chan, J. Kittler, S. Marcel, C. McCool, et al. E. Argones-Rúa, JL. Alba-Castro, M. Villegas, R. Paredes, V. Struc, N. Pavesic, AA. Salah, H. Fang, N. Costen. (2009). Face Video Competition. In: ICB. pp.715-724.

  H. Fang, N. Costen (2009). From Rank-N to Rank-1 Face Recognition Based on Motion Similarity. In: BMVC. pp.1-11.

  J. Darby, B. Li, N. Costen, DJ. Fleet, ND. Lawrence (2009). Backing Off: Hierarchical Decomposition of Activity for 3D Novel Pose Recovery. In: BMVC. pp.1-11.

  H. Fang, NP. Costen (2008). Tracking Face Localization with a Hierarchical Progressive Face Model. In: Tracking Humans for the Evaluation of their Motion in Image Sequences. pp.89-99.

  H. Fang, N. Costen (2008). Behavioral Consistency Extraction for Face Verification. In: COST 2102 Conference (Prague). pp.291-305.

  H. Fang, N. Costen, D. Cristinacce, J. Darby (2008). 3D facial geometry recovery via group-wise optical flow. In: FG. pp.1-6.

  J. Darby, B. Li, N. Costen (2008). Tracking a walking person using activity-guided annealed particle filtering. In: FG. pp.1-6.

  J. Darby, B. Li, N. Costen (2008). Human Activity Tracking from Moving Camera Stereo Data. In: BMVC. pp.1-10.

  J. Darby, B. Li, NP. Costen (2008). Behaviour based particle filtering for human articulated motion tracking. In: ICPR. pp.1-4.

  J. Darby, B. Li, NP. Costen (2007). Human Activity Recognition: Enhancement for Gesture Based Game Interfaces. In: Cybergames. pp.115-120.

  Q. Meng, B. Li, N. Costen, H. Holstein (2007). Functional Modelling of Large Scattered Data Sets Using Neural Networks. In: ICANN (1). pp.441-449.

  H. Fang, NP. Costen (2007). 3D Face Reconstruction Under Imperfect Tracking Circumstances Using Shape Model Constraints. In: ISVC (2). pp.519-528.

  M. Brown, NP. Costen (2004). Non-Linear Feature Selection for Classification. In: British Machine Vision Conference. pp.607-616.

  NP. Costen, M. Brown (2003). Exploratory Sparse Models for Face Recognition. In: British Machine Vision Conference. pp.13-22.

  N. Costen, TF. Cootes, CJ. Taylor (2001). Markov fields for recognition derived from facial texture error. In: BMVC. pp.1-10.

  NP. Costen, TF. Cootes, CJ. Taylor (2000). Compensating for ensemble-specific effects when building facial models. In: British Machine Vision Conference. pp.62-71.

  NP. Costen, TF. Cootes, GJ. Edwards, CJ. Taylor (1999). Simultaneous extraction of functional face sub-spaces. In: Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. pp.492-497.

  N. Costen, TF. Cootes, GJ. Edwards, CJ. Taylor (1999). Automatic Extraction of the Face Identity-Subspace. In: BMVC. pp.1-10.

  N. Costen, TF. Cootes, GJ. Edwards, CJ. Taylor (1999). Simultaneous Extraction of Functional Face Subspaces. In: CVPR. pp.1492-1492.

  S. Tagashira, NP. Costen, S. Akamatsu (1997). A Face Image Retrieval System Based on Principal Component Analysis. In: Technical Report of IEICE.

  NP. Costen, IG. Craw, T. Kato, G. Robertson, S. Akamatsu (1996). Manifold caricatures: On the psychological consistency of computer face recognition. In: IEEE International Conference on Face and Gesture Recognition. pp.1-4.

  NP. Costen, IG. Craw, T. Kato, S. Akamatsu (1996). Manifold Caricatures: Predicting Facial Transformations. In: Proceedings of the Engineering Sciences Society Conference of the IEICE. pp.338-339.

  NP. Costen, IG. Craw, S. Akamatsu (1996). Automatic face recognition: what representation ?. In: Technical Report of IEICE. pp.37-42.

  N. Costen, I. Craw, G. Robertson, S. Akamatsu (1996). Automatic Face Recognition: What Representation?. In: ECCV (1). pp.504-513.

  N. Costen, T. Kato, S. Akamatsu, I. Craw, G. Robertson (1996). Manifold Caricatures: on the Psychological Consistency of Computer Face Recognition. In: FG. pp.4-9.

  IG. Craw, NP. Costen, T. Kato, GM. Robertson, S. Akamatsu (1995). Automatic face recognition: Combining configuration and texture. In: IEEE International Conference on Face and Gesture Recognition. pp.53-58.