In 1971, Hartley received a BSc degree from the Australian National University followed by MSc (1972) and PhD (1976) degrees in mathematics from the University of Toronto.
He also obtained an MSc degree in computer science from Stanford University in 1983.
[1] His work is primarily devoted to the fields of Artificial intelligence, Image processing, and Computer vision.
He is best known for his 2000 book Multiple View Geometry in computer vision, written with Andrew Zisserman, now in its second edition (2004).
[2] Hartley was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 2005[3] and awarded their Hannan Medal in 2023.