The programme has effectively delivered on its objective of providing international mobility, multi‑disciplinary training, and intersectoral experience for experienced researchers, while generating high‑quality scientific outputs.
The research portfolio spans seven projects, addressing emerging challenges within creative technologies. Collectively, these projects have produced 11 peer‑reviewed publications, novel datasets, production‑oriented prototypes, and exploitation pathways aligned with industry partners.
Advanced 4K/8K Image and Video Upscaling for VFX Production: Developed deep‑learning super‑resolution methods achieving significant improvements in temporal stability, and HDR quality.
Digital Human Modelling and Animation: Delivered substantial advances in realistic digital‑human pipelines through real‑time audio‑driven facial‑animation systems, a new 4D face‑performance dataset, and a domain‑adaptive expression‑transfer framework.
Personalised and Persuasive Game Design: Investigated validated experimental protocols for affective‑game evaluation, revealing robust relationships between personality traits, emotional responses, and gameplay preferences.
AI‑Driven Train Track Infrastructure Monitoring: Tested and evaluated zoning, vegetation‑detection, and multi‑class object‑recognition algorithms for UAV‑based railway inspection.
GAN‑Based Ultra‑High‑Resolution Rendering and Image Generation: Introduced advanced GAN‑based pipelines combining latent‑space encoding, G‑buffer integration, cross‑attention fusion, and multi‑scale adversarial learning.
Sparse‑View 3D Reconstruction and Gaussian Splatting: Developed enhanced Gaussian‑Splatting‑based methods for high‑fidelity 3D reconstruction from sparse imagery, enabling accurate geometry and detail recovery with significantly fewer input images.
Emotionally Responsive Intelligent Virtual Characters: Crafted an innovative LLM‑driven dialogue framework integrating speech sentiment, gameplay context, and memory‑based reasoning to generate believable real‑time NPC interaction.
Across all projects, dissemination activities included presentations at nationally and internationally recognised venues such as CASA, CVMP, HCI International, SIGGRAPH‑associated workshops, BFX Festival, TechFusion Summit, and global industry events. Several exploitation pathways have already been established, including continued industrial collaboration with partner organisations, technology demonstration opportunities, and the development of new external funding proposals with partners from the creative industries and cultural‑heritage sectors.
