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 – 2025

    Wu, T., & Tsotsos, J. K. (2025). Real-world visual search goes beyond eye movements: Active searchers select 3D scene viewpoints too. PLoS One 20(7): e0319719 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0319719 Wu, T. C., & Tsotsos, J. K. (2025). Exploring the different roles of fixations in an active visual search task. Journal of Vision, 25(9), 2100. https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.25.9.2100

    By Bahman Rouhani | March 19, 2025

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  • Congrats to Iuliia Kotseruba on wining the Best Student Paper Award at IV 2024!

    Iuliia Kotseruba, a current postdoctoral fellow at Tsotsos lab, has won the Best Student Paper Award at the IEEE International Vehicles Symposium 2024. The award was granted for her paper SCOUT+: Towards Practical Task-Driven Drivers’ Gaze Prediction and recognizes her work during her PhD in Professor John Tsotsos’ lab in the Department of Electrical Engineering […]

    By Bahman Rouhani | July 8, 2024

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  • Lab members at NCRN24

    A group of lab members at the NCRN (NSERC Canadian Robotics Network) 2024 field trials. From left to right: Bahman Rouhani, Yi Wai Chow, Mingshi Chi, Markus Solbach, Tiffany Wu and Angelica Paynter.

    By Bahman Rouhani | June 21, 2024

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