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Professor Tilo Burghardt

  • BS8 1UB

Accepting PhD Students

Personal profile

Research interests

About: Tilo Burghardt is a Professor of Computer Vision and Animal Biometrics at the University of Bristol (UK) researching AI for wildlife and farming. His career contributed to establishing Animal Biometrics as a new field at the interface between the computational and biological sciences. He was one of the first researchers to monitor individual animals in their natural habitat via automated real-time computer vision in the early 2000s. His work over the last 20 years received multiple international award nominations (incl CVPR'25/CVPR'26) and has been published in over 100 scientific papers. His computational AI solutions contributed to ecology, conservation, imageomics, taxonomics, healthcare, animal husbandry, and smart ethical farming. He is also a passionate and award-winning educator and leads teaching and learning as School Education Director in Computer Science at the University of Bristol. His Professional Homepage and his Google Scholar Profile lists his scientific papers in full. 

Short Biography: Tilo graduated with Distinction in Media Computing (Bakk. Medien-Inf.) at Dresden University of Technology in Germany. Following a Hölderlin Scholarship award he received an MSc in Advanced Computing and later a PhD in Computer Vision from the University of Bristol, UK. After post-doctoral research at the School of Physics, he was awarded a Fellowship of the Research Councils UK and tenure as a Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, Associate Professor, and then Full Professor.

Recognition: Tilo Burghardt's research has received multiple international accolades including Best Paper Award Nominations at CVPR2025 and CVPR2026, as well as an entry in the Top 25 Life and Biological Sciences Articles of 2022 (Nature Communications). He was also a member of the SPHERE Project which won the organisational WTN World Technology Award in the Category Health. As an educator, Tilo Burghardt received multiple prizes from both educational institutions and Bristol student societies including the 'CSS Lecturer of the Year' award, the 'Best Lecturer in Computer Science' award, and the 'CSS Most Enthusiastic Lecturer Award for Outstanding Teaching' award. He was both a 'Best of Bristol Lecturer' and recipient of the University of Bristol 'Award for Education'.

Academic Citizenship: Tilo Burghardt is Associate Editor of IET Computer Vision and main organising academic of the International Workshop Series on Camera Traps, AI and Ecology (CamTrapAI). He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (HEA), a Member of ELLIS, and has alumni membership of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation (Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes). Tilo Burghardt is a core collaborator of the ABC Global Center and volunteers as a scientific consultant at the Wild Chimpanzee Foundation (WCF). He has contributed to the British Machine Vision Association (BMVA) as chair of the 24th British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC).

Online Footprint: Tilo Burghardt maintains his personal Tilo Burghardt's Professional Homepage (tilo.earth), his Institutional Webpage, his Institutional Reseach Profile, his LinkedIn Page, and his Google Scholar Profile

Research Groups and Themes

  • Intelligent Systems Laboratory (MaVi)
  • Visual Information Laboratory
  • Engineering Education Research Group
  • Intelligent Systems Laboratory
  • Digital Health
  • SPHERE
  • Isambard-AI

Keywords

  • Animal Biometrics
  • Computer Vision
  • AI for Ecology
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Conservation Technology
  • Imageomics
  • Ethical Smart Farming

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Collaborations and top research areas from the last five years

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  • Animal Biometrics: quantifying and detecting phenotypic appearance

    Kuehl, H. & Burghardt, T., 2013, In: Trends in Ecology and Evolution. 28, 7, p. 432-441

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticle (Academic Journal)peer-review

    162 Citations (Scopus)
  • Perspectives in machine learning for wildlife conservation

    Tuia, D., Kellenberger, B., Beery, S., Costelloe, B. R., Zuffi, S., Risse, B., Mathis, A., Mathis, M. W., van Langevelde, F., Burghardt, T., Kays, R., Klinck, H., Wikelski, M., Couzin, I. D., van Horn, G., Crofoot, M. C., Stewart, C. V. & Berger-Wolf, T., 9 Feb 2022, In: Nature Communications. 13, 1, 792.

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticle (Academic Journal)peer-review

    Open Access
    File
    598 Citations (Scopus)
    480 Downloads (Pure)
  • The SA-FARI Dataset: Segment Anything in Footage of Animals for Recognition and Identification

    Wasmuht, D. F., Brookes, O., Schall, M., Palencia, P., Beirne, C., Burghardt, T., Mirmehdi, M., Kühl, H. S., Arandjelovic, M., Pottie, S., Bermant, P., Asheim, B., Toh, Y. J., Elzinga, A., Holmberg, J., Whitworth, A., Flatt, E., Gustafson, L., Ryali, C. & Hu, Y.-T. & 4 others, Guo, B., Westbury, A., Saenko, K. & Suris, D., 6 Jun 2026, (Accepted/In press) Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR). Computer Vision Foundation (CVF), p. 21679-21689 11 p.

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference Contribution (Conference Proceeding)

    Open Access