Rate My Professor Nick Barnes

Professor Nick Barnes serves as Professor and Associate Director for Academic Staff Development in the School of Computing at the Australian National University. He earned his B.Sc. (Hons) and Ph.D. from the University of Melbourne. His research focuses on computer vision, 3D vision, saliency and salient object detection, prosthetic vision, biological vision, and probabilistic and generative methods for dense prediction. Barnes leads a project with the ANU-Optus Bushfire Research Centre of Excellence utilizing computer vision to detect bushfires from fire-towers. He is a lead investigator on initiatives developing computer vision algorithms to assist the visually impaired, partnering with Bionic Vision Technologies, the Centre for Eye Research Australia, the Bionics Institute, and Health@CSIRO. From 2010 to 2015, his work on prosthetic vision was funded by the Australian Research Council through Bionic Vision Australia, contributing vision processing for a suprachoroidal retinal prosthesis designed to restore vision for profoundly blind individuals, with ongoing involvement in clinical trials.

Barnes has supervised numerous PhD students, with over 20 having graduated, including on topics such as camouflaged object detection, weakly supervised segmentation, and uncertainty calibration. His research group has published extensively in premier venues, including IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, CVPR, ICCV, NeurIPS, and ICLR. Key publications include 'Learning Saliency from Single Noisy Labelling: A Robust Model Fitting Perspective' by J. Zhang et al. (IEEE TPAMI, early access 2021), 'Simultaneously Localize, Segment and Rank the Camouflaged Objects' by Y. Lv et al. (CVPR 2021), 'Vicinity Vision Transformer' by W. Sun et al. (IEEE TPAMI, 2023), 'P2C: Self-Supervised Point Cloud Completion from Single Partial Clouds' by R. Cui et al. (ICCV 2023), and 'Polarity Loss: Improving Visual-Semantic Alignment for Zero-Shot Detection' by S. Rahman et al. (IEEE TNNLS, 2025). Students under his supervision have earned awards such as Best Paper at DICTA 2021 and the JG Crawford Prize for PhD Thesis. Previously, he directed the Robomutts++ team to fourth place in the RoboCup Sony Legged League in 2002.