Vision is the most important sense that humans have. Computer vision tries to endow machines with similar capabilities to interpret visual input. As a highly applied area, computer vision is closely related to and requires a strong interdisciplinary expertise from areas like solid state physics, mathematics, psychology, neurobiology, computer science and engineering. With the increasing number of applications in civil, defense and industrial sector, computer vision research is becoming more and more essential for the technological advancement of a country.

Some of the key application areas of computer vision are in public security. In civil applications, one of the most prominent application fields is security e.g. surveillance, biometric authentication, forensic record analysis such as face, finger prints etc to assist in crime control.

COMVIS at Department of Electrical Engineering, COMSATS Lahore is established with the following aims.

It provides a common platform for interdisciplinary research. The research activities and expertise are used to train more young people at a minimum proficient level. It provides a useful resource for undergraduate and graduate level related courses and an opportunity for students to work with real world problems. One major aim is to solve and address many existing application problems in Pakistan. It is therefore a primary focus to bring in external funding by means of several high impact projects.

With these aims in mind, the group, initially, has focus on primarily these application areas.

• Applied Basic Research in Image Pattern Recognition: fundamental issues in statistical learning.


• Biometric Recognition: individual identification by analyzing their physiological and behavioral characteristics, including face, iris, fingerprint, palm print, etc.


• Intelligent video processing and understanding: automatic video analysis and understanding to reduce human intervention in surveillance.


• Surveillance (tracking, identification, road safety)


• Object categorization and scene analysis in natural images (e.g. building extraction, object recognition, camouflage breaking, feature analysis)