Rate My Professor Steven Mills

Steven Mills is a Professor in the School of Computing at the University of Otago, part of the Division of Sciences. Born and educated in Ōtepoti/Dunedin, he obtained his BSc (Hons) in Computer Science from the University of Otago in 1997 and his PhD in Computer Science in 2000. After a brief period as a software developer in Christchurch, he held a lectureship at The University of Nottingham. Returning to New Zealand in 2006, he worked in commercial research and development at the Geospatial Research Centre and then at Areograph Ltd. In 2011, he returned to the University of Otago's School of Computing as a lecturer, advancing to senior lecturer, associate professor, and ultimately professor, as recognized by his Inaugural Professorial Lecture "A vision for computing" on 6 May 2025.

Professor Mills' research centers on computer vision, particularly the reconstruction of 3D scenes from multiple images. Advances in this area allow for the creation of detailed 3D models solely from photographs, with applications spanning terrain modeling from aerial imagery, architectural model construction, and the generation of realistic virtual environments for games and entertainment. His interests also extend to motion analysis, stereo vision, image-based rendering, and computer vision applications in scientific imagery analysis. Mills has applied his expertise to cultural and heritage projects, including the Ātea project developing a virtual wharenui in collaboration with Te Rūnanga o Awarua, interactive exhibits for the Hou Rongo exhibition on Moriori culture revitalization with the Hokotehi Moriori Trust, and 3D shape analysis for traditional Māori tools in partnership with archaeologists and Tūhura Otago Museum. He co-directs the Centre for Computational Culture and Heritage at the University of Otago. Among his influential publications are "Colocalization of fluorescent markers in confocal microscope images of plant cells" (2008, cited 434 times), "Recovering motion fields: An evaluation of eight optical flow algorithms" (1998, cited 423 times), "A robot system for pruning grape vines" (2017, cited 280 times), and recent contributions such as "Quadtree-based spatial-visual memory for object navigation" (2024) and papers at the 2024 International Conference on Image and Vision Computing New Zealand. Mills has served on the Marsden Fund panel for Mathematical and Information Sciences.