Tao Xiang

Professor Tao Xiang holds the position of Professor of Computer Vision and Machine Learning at the University of Surrey, where he is also a Distinguished Chair. He leads the Body Behaviour Group at Samsung AI Centre, Cambridge. His research focuses on computer vision, including video surveillance, activity analysis, and sketch-based recognition, alongside machine learning domains like zero-shot learning and domain generalization. He has published over 160 papers (h-index 60) and secured £3.9M+ in grants.

Key affiliations include the Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences and the Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing (CVSSP). His work spans generative models for sketches, 3D shape retrieval from VR sketches, and virtual try-on systems. Notable contributions include the FS-COCO dataset for scene sketches and advancements in temporal action detection via vision-language prompting.

Research interests emphasize cross-modal tasks (e.g., SBIR/FG-SBIR), domain adaptation, and transformer-based vision models. Collaborations with industry (Samsung AI) and foundational contributions to datasets (e.g., VR sketch collections) underscore his interdisciplinary impact. Future work includes creative object generation (PartCraft), explainable AI for sketches, and scalable generative models.