John Illingworth

John Illingworth is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Surrey whose computer vision research includes a long series of papers on the Hough transform, a shape-analysis technique. Trained in physics at Birmingham and Oxford, he moved to the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in 1983, met Josef Kittler there and turned to computer vision. With Kittler, he published The Adaptive Hough Transform in 1987 and A Survey of the Hough Transform in 1988, and a 1992 paper with John Princen and Kittler gave the method a formal definition. At Surrey, which he joined in 1986, he organized the 1993 British Machine Vision Conference, was promoted to a personal chair in 1999 and later worked with Andrew Gilbert and Richard Bowden on action recognition from mined spatio-temporal features. He became an IAPR Fellow in 2010 and the British Machine Vision Association's Distinguished Fellow for 2012.

Now at: University of Surrey
Works: 146
Citations: 10,436
h-index: 36
Badges: Loyal

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 22 October 2026.

Timeline

By 1983

Physics at Birmingham and Oxford

Originally from Bishop Auckland in County Durham, he earns a BSc in physics at the University of Birmingham and a DPhil in experimental particle physics in Oxford's department of Particle Physics. He coauthors a 1983 Physics Letters B paper on KK-bar pair production in photon–photon collisions.
1983

Computer vision at Rutherford Appleton

In 1983, he moves to the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, where he meets Josef Kittler and turns from physics to computer vision. On his first day of work there, he arrives after diving into the Thames at three in the morning to rescue a drowning man, and the British Humane Association awards him a medal for bravery.
1986–1988

Surrey and the Hough transform

He joins the academic staff of the University of Surrey in 1986. With Kittler, he publishes Minimum Error Thresholding in Pattern Recognition in 1986, The Adaptive Hough Transform in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence in 1987, and A Survey of the Hough Transform in 1988.
1989–1994

A formal Hough transform

With John Princen and Josef Kittler, he presents a hierarchical approach to line extraction at CVPR in 1989 and, at ICCV in 1990, a framework that treats the Hough transform as a hypothesis testing method to quantify and optimise its performance. Their 1992 paper in the Journal of Mathematical Imaging and Vision gives the Hough transform, a shape-analysis technique, a formal definition that covers a wide variety of published algorithms, and a journal version of the hypothesis-testing framework follows in 1994.
1993–1999

A personal chair at Surrey

He organizes the British Machine Vision Conference at Surrey in 1993. With Adrian Hilton, Andrew Stoddart and Terry Windeatt, he works on 3D modelling from range data, including an ECCV 1996 paper on surface reconstruction from multiple range images, and Surrey promotes him to a personal chair in 1999.
2008–2009

Mined features for action recognition

With Andrew Gilbert and Richard Bowden, he presents an action recognition method at ECCV in 2008 that mines compound features from simple 2D corners in space and time and recognises and localises activities in real time. Their ICCV 2009 follow-up uses data mining over dense corner features and is tested on the KTH, multi-KTH and Hollywood datasets.
2010–2012

IAPR and BMVA fellowships

The International Association for Pattern Recognition names him a Fellow in 2010 for contributions to image processing and computer vision. In 2012, the British Machine Vision Association names him its Distinguished Fellow, honouring his years as its chairman and his work as the driving force behind its Computer Vision summer school. By 2012, he is a Fellow of the Institution of Electrical Engineers and a co-editor of the IEE journal Vision, Image and Signal Processing.
As of October 2026

Emeritus professor at Surrey

His later work includes a 2005 survey of 3D assisted face recognition with Josef Kittler, Adrian Hilton and Miroslav Hamouz. He is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Surrey.