Background

David Kerr received his BSc degree in Physics with Engineering Science at the University of Hertfordshire and his MSc. degree in Optoelectronics from the University of Northumbria, UK. He joined the Mechanical Engineering department at Loughborough University in 1985, obtaining his PhD in Laser Metrology in 1992. Now a Senior Lecturer, his research includes Digital Image Processing, Computer Vision, Industrial Machine Vision, and Interferogram Analysis

School Research Group

Mechatronic and Manufacturing Systems Integration
Optical Engineering

Research Interests and Activities

David has recently completed a major research project (funded by DEFRA/LINK) on the use of lasers and machine vision for sealing and inspection of polymer-based food packaging. A commercial system is currently being developed to exploit this new, patented process.

His other recent activities have included: fast measurement of transient vibrations in engineering structures using speckle interferometry, object recognition and location using invariants, cutting tool condition monitoring, Artificial Neural Networks for object recognition in industrial machine vision applications, eye-tracking and measurement to monitor driver alertness, processing of x-ray images to aid orthopaedic surgery, and the use of computer vision to measure ball spin and trajectory.

External Activities

Journal editorships
Guest Editor for special issue of Optics & Lasers in Engineering, on Fringe Analysis (Optics and Lasers in Engineering 41 (4) (2004) 597-599)
Previously Guest Editor for same subject and journal in1993, 1995 & 1999

Professional affiliations
MInstP, CPhys

Journal referee
Regular referee for: International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology, Applied Optics, Measurement Science & Technology, Optics & Lasers technology, Optics Letters, Optics & Lasers in Engineering

Collaborative Research
Lead Partner and Principal Investigator for DEFRA/LINK Advanced Food Manufacturing Programme, project AFM114, “An Intelligent package sealing and inspection system for semi-rigid food containers.” Companies contributing significant funding over the 3-year programme (2002-2005) were Recipe Dish (Pennine Foods) Ltd, RPC Containers Ltd, Packaging Automation Ltd, GSI Lumonics Ltd, FFP Packaging Solutions Ltd.

Commercialisation of research
International Patent Application No. PCT/GB2005/004836, “Method and Apparatus for Verifying Seal Integrity” resulting from work on DEFRA project AFM114.

Publications

View central admin publications database (new window)

Teaching Responsibilities

Module MMC901 Digital Image Processing (responsible examiner)
Module MMP901 Industrial Machine Vision (responsible examiner)
Module MMB300 Engineering Computation (co-tutor)

University Administration

Member of University Senate (2007-2010)

Links

David Kerr's home page