Nick Barnes

Timeline

1. 1992–2003

   Melbourne PhD and lectureship

   He earns a B.Sc. with honours in 1992 and a PhD in computer vision for robot navigation at the University of Melbourne in 1999. In 1999 he is a visiting research fellow at the LIRA-Lab at the University of Genoa, supported by an Achiever Award from the Queens' Trust for Young Australians, and from 2000 to 2003 he lectures in Melbourne's Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering.

2. 2003–2018

   NICTA and Data61 in Canberra

   He joins NICTA's Canberra Research Laboratory in 2003, and the lab later merges into Data61@CSIRO. By 2018 he is a senior principal researcher and research group leader in computer vision at Data61 and an adjunct associate professor at the Australian National University.

3. 2010–2014

   Vision processing for a bionic eye

   He is a lead investigator on vision processing for Bionic Vision Australia, an Australian Research Council initiative funded from 2010 to build the first Australian bionic eye implant. Starting in 2012, three patients receive a 20-electrode retinal implant, and his team's software, which converts head-worn camera images into electrical stimulation, is tested with them through 2014.

4. 2013

   Prosthetic vision processing overview

   He publishes "An overview of vision processing in implantable prosthetic vision" in the proceedings of the 2013 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing in Melbourne. The paper frames the background and challenges of vision processing for implantable prosthetic vision and gives an overview of recent work.

5. 2017–2018

   Bionic Vision Technologies raises US$18m

   The Bionic Vision Australia work, in which vision processing is a key part, becomes the start-up Bionic Vision Technologies, and the spin-out, in which CSIRO is a shareholder, raises US$18m in capital in 2017. The implant and its vision processing go into a further four profoundly blind people in 2018.

6. 2020–2021

   Saliency and camouflage detection papers

   In 2020, he coauthors Uncertainty Inspired RGB-D Saliency Detection, which uses a generative architecture with a latent variable to model labeling variations in saliency maps. In 2021, he coauthors a CVPR paper that presents Rank-Net, a ranking-based network to localize, segment and rank camouflaged objects.

7. 2022

   Vicinity Vision Transformer

   In 2022, he coauthors Vicinity Vision Transformer with Weixuan Sun, Yiran Zhong and colleagues. Its Vicinity Attention adds a locality bias to vision transformers with linear complexity, and the model reaches state-of-the-art image classification accuracy with 50% fewer parameters than previous methods.

8. As of October 2026

   Computer vision professor at ANU

   He is Professor of Computer Vision and Associate Director for Academic Staff Development at the ANU School of Computing, with research interests in computer vision, 3D vision, probabilistic and generative methods for dense prediction, biological vision, and saliency and salient object detection. In March 2026, the School announces a Google-supported initiative that includes his project on a programming course for scientists and engineers that integrates generative AI. He continues prosthetic-vision work with Bionic Vision Technologies, the Centre for Eye Research Australia, the Bionics Institute and Health@CSIRO.