The Lab Story

The Laboratory for Active and Attentive Vision (LAAV) has its roots in the original Computer Vision Laboratory at the University of Toronto founded by John Tsotsos in 1980. In those years it was part of the Artificial Intelligence Group in the Department of Computer Science. There, Tsotsos also founded the Technical Report Series: Research in Biological and Computational Vision (1984 – 1996). In January 2000, Tsotsos moved to York University to take up the Directorship of the Centre for Vision Research and a portion of that lab followed him. The history of the current lab thus goes back to 1980 and includes a significant number of students, post-docs and publications from the pre-York era.

At York, the Laboratory for Active and Attentive Vision is situated within the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in the Lassonde Scholl of Engineering. It is also one of the many labs in the much larger Centre for Vision Research (cvr.yorku.ca) and in the new Centre for Innovation in Compuoting at Lassonde (http://ical.lassonde.yorku.ca/). With a rich set of international collaborators, and a well-equipped infrastructure the lab is an exciting research focus for interdisciplinary research on a variety of vision topics within seven themes: Computational Neuroscience, Vision, Visually Guided Robotics, Computer Vision, Visual Attention, Cognitive Architectures and Human Vision and Visual Behaviour. The Venn diagram below shows the breadth of projects within these themes.


Research Areas

Click on subtopics to view current active projects.

Active Recognition Autonomous Vehicles Binocular Heads Complexity Spatial Cognition Visual Search Attention Control Cognitive Programs Development Eye Movements Learning by Composition and Exploration Selective Tuning Shape Vision Architecture Visual Working Memory Biomedical Applications Saliency Navigation Motion Colour

Recent News

  • Publications – 2023

    Bartsch, M. V., Merkel, C., Strumpf, H., Schoenfeld, M. A., Tsotsos, J. K., & Hopf, J. (2023). A cortical zoom-in operation underlies covert shifts of visual spatial attention. Science Advances, 9(10). https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.ade7996 Kotseruba, I., & Tsotsos, J. K. (2023). Understanding and modeling the effects of task and context on drivers’ gaze allocation. arXiv (Cornell University). […]

    By tech | December 29, 2023

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  • Publications – 2022

    Kotseruba, I., & Tsotsos, J. K. (2022). Attention for vision-based assistive and automated driving: A review of algorithms and datasets. IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems. Biparva, M., Fernández-Llorca, D., Gonzalo, R. I., & Tsotsos, J. (2022). Video action recognition for lane-change classification and prediction of surrounding vehicles. IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles. Tsotsos, J. […]

    By tech | December 17, 2022

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  • Congratulations to Paria Mehrani on winning the 2022 Colour Research Society of Canada Student Award

    Paria Mehrani, a current postdoctoral visitor at the Lassonde School of Engineering, has won the Colour Research Society of Canada (CRSC) 2022 Student Award for Graduate Students. The award recognizes her work while she was a PhD student in Professor John Tsotsos’ lab in the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science. Titled “A Biologically […]

    By tech | June 29, 2022

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