The British Machine Vision Association : The Sullivan Doctoral Thesis Prize

The Sullivan Doctoral Thesis Prize

The Sullivan Doctoral Thesis Prize celebrates the best PhD thesis in computer vision completed at a UK university. The British Machine Vision Association (BMVA) funds the prize of £750 each year in memory of the late Professor Geoff Sullivan. The winner is announced each year, and the award is presented at the British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC).

Who can apply

You can apply if you passed your PhD viva at a university in the United Kingdom between 1 September 2026 and 31 August 2027. We use the date of your successful viva, shown on the signed examiners’ reports. Your thesis can be on any topic covered by the current BMVC call for papers.

What to submit

Please submit the following through CMT:

A summary of your thesis, at most two pages. Explain the main ideas, the main technical results, why the work matters, and any real world uses.
Your full PhD thesis as a PDF, or a link if the file is large.
Proof that you passed your viva. Send either a recommendation letter from your external examiner, or both the pre viva and post viva reports.

You may also include a short statement from your supervisor, but this is optional. A report from your internal examiner is also welcome, but not required.

Please send all files as PDFs, or give a link we can open. If any file is confidential, please get permission before you send it. By applying, you agree that the BMVA may host your thesis in its public thesis archive.

Apply here: CMT submission page

Deadline: 17 September 2027

How we choose the winner

The Sullivan Thesis Prize Chairs assess every application. They weigh the strength of each candidate’s research record alongside the novelty and significance of the thesis. We tell all applicants the result before BMVC.

What the winner receives

The winner receives £750 and free registration for BMVC, so they can attend and collect the award in person. If the winner cannot attend, we send the certificate by email.

Questions

Please email the Sullivan Thesis Prize Chairs at Dr Alex Mackin.

Previous Award Winners Photos

Thesis Prive Awarding

Previous winners

Year	Winner	Institution	Thesis
2026	Subhadeep Koley	University of Surrey	Democratising Sketch-based Vision Applications via Foundation Models
2025	Alberto Pepe	University of Cambridge	Machine Learning with Geometric Algebra: Multivectors for Modelling, Understanding and Computing
2024	Liliane Momeni	University of Oxford	Sign Language Understanding using Multimodal Learning
2022	Shangzhe Wu	University of Oxford	Unsupervised Learning of 3D Objects in the Wild
2021	Jaime Spencer Martin	University of Surrey	Learning Generic Deep Feature Representations
2020	Dimitrios Kollias	Imperial College London	Affect Recognition & Generation in-the-wild
2019	Alex Kendall	University of Cambridge	Geometry and Uncertainty in Deep Learning for Computer Vision
2018	Oscar Mendez	University of Surrey	Collaborative Strategies for Autonomous Localisation, 3D Reconstruction and Pathplanning
2017	Karel Lebeda	University of Surrey	2D and 3D Tracking and Modelling
2016	Xiatian Zhu	Queen Mary, University of London	Semantic Structure Discovery in Surveillance Videos
2015	Vibhav Vineet	Oxford Brookes University	Recognition, Reorganisation, Reconstruction and Reinteraction for Scene Understanding
2014	Mattias Heinrich	University of Oxford	Deformable lung registration for pulmonary image analysis of MRI and CT scans
2013	Patrick Ott (joint winner)	University of Leeds	Segmentation Features, Visibility Modeling and Shared Parts for Object Detection
2013	Shoaib Ehsan (joint winner)	University of Essex	Improving the Effectiveness of Local Feature Detection
2012	Marco Paladini	Queen Mary, University of London	Deformable and Articulated 3D Reconstruction from monocular video sequences
2011	Charles Bibby	University of Oxford	Probabilistic Methods for Enhanced Marine Situational Awareness
2010	Olly Oechsle	University of Essex	Towards the Automatic Construction of Machine Vision Systems using Genetic Programming
2009	Pawan Kumar Mudigonda	Oxford Brookes University	Combinatorial and Convex Optimization for Probabilistic Models in Computer Vision
2008	Pushmeet Kohli	Oxford Brookes University	Minimizing Dynamic and Higher Order Energy Functions using Graph Cuts
2007	Josef Sivic	University of Oxford	Efficient visual search of images and videos
2006	Rob Fergus	University of Oxford	Visual Object Category Recognition
2005	Björn Stenger	University of Cambridge	Model-based hand tracking using a hierarchical Bayesian filter
2004	Jonathan Starck	University of Surrey	Human Modelling from Multiple Views
2003	Rhodri Davies	University of Manchester	Learning Shape: Optimal Models for Analysing Shape Variability
2002	Albert Chung	University of Oxford	Vessel and aneurysm reconstruction using speed and flow coherence information in phase contrast magnetic-resonance angiograms.
2001	Gareth J Edwards	University of Manchester	Learning to identify faces in images and sequences.
2000	Richard Bowden	Brunel University	Learning non-linear Models of Shape and Motion
1999	Neil Johnson	University of Leeds	Learning Object Behaviour Models

Note: The 2023 prize was not awarded.

The British Machine Vision Associationand Society for Pattern Recognition