Annual Report 2007/2008 - Fachgruppe Informatik an der RWTH ...

I started my studies of Computer Science at the University of
Stuttgart in 1995. From 1998 to 1999, I then had the
opportunity to go to Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta
for a 1-year study period. This stay abroad was a great
experience, which I can recommend to every student. It was
there that I got to know and like the US style of graduate-level
teaching and performing hands-on research, and it was
ultimately this experience that convinced me of continuing for
a PhD. During my M.Sc. thesis at Georgia Tech, I also first
came into contact with Computer Vision and found it to be a
very interesting and exciting field of study. It is therefore not
surprising that after coming back from Georgia Tech to finish
my Diplom in Stuttgart, I went straight on to pursue a PhD in
Computer Vision. For this, I joined the group of Prof. Dr. Bernt
Schiele at ETH Zurich in January 2001. In October 2004, I received my doctoral degree for
my dissertation on “Interleaved object categorization and segmentation”, for which I was
awarded the ETH Medal. As my PhD advisor Prof. Schiele took on a call for a tenured
professor position at TU Darmstadt during the final year of my PhD, I joined him for a oneyear
postdoc period directly after finishing my thesis in order to help build up the new group
there. In January 2006, I then went back to ETH Zurich to take on a position as postdoctoral
research associate in the computer vision group of Prof. Dr. Luc Van Gool, where I
supervised a subgroup of between 5 and 6 PhD students.
My research interests lie in visual object recognition, segmentation, 3D reconstruction, and
tracking, and especially in combinations of those areas. This is a very exciting time to work in
Computer Vision, as many of its individual areas are reaching a level where research
approaches start to work under difficult real-world conditions and where practical
applications suddenly become possible. Through my research, and that of the PhD students I
supervised, I have contributed to this development. During my PhD thesis, I developed an
approach for local-feature based visual object categorization that can recognize novel objects
of a learned category, while simultaneously segmenting them from the image background. In
later work, I then extended this approach to create a state-of-the-art pedestrian detector which
is particularly suited for recognition in crowded scenes. Through a combination of this
approach with tracking and motion estimation, my group built a mobile vision system that
can, in its latest instantiation, automatically detect other traffic participants (cars, pedestrians,
bicyclists) in a vehicle’s field of view and track them through highly dynamic inner-city
scenes. In other work, we combined recognition with 3D reconstruction in order to
automatically build visually pleasing and semantically meaningful 3D city models. Finally,
we developed methods for the automatic extraction of interesting objects and landmark
buildings from community photo collections such as Flickr and for using those results for
visual object recognition from mobile phones. This research work has been internationally
widely recognized and has won a number of awards, including the DAGM Main Prize in
2004, the CVPR Best Video Award in 2006, the CVPR Best Paper Award in 2007, the
Optical 3D Measurement Techniques Best Paper Award in 2007, and the DAGM Olympus
Prize in 2008.
At RWTH, I am affiliated with the Excellence Cluster “UMIC – Ultra High Speed Mobile
Information and Communication”. This cluster provides a very exciting research environment
for my new group to develop computer vision applications for mobile devices and platforms.
Apart from continuing the abovementioned research lines, a main focus of our work will be
on creating computer vision applications for mobile phones. In addition, I will start my
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