Visual computing and HCI are wide-ranging fields, encompassing such topics as computer graphics, image processing, display and user interface design, computer vision, and scene understanding. This research can help machines to perceive and understand their environment, on the one hand, and to present information to and interact with users on the other.
Groups and Researchers in this Field
Perceiving Systems
Michael J. Black is one of the founding directors of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, where he leads the Perceiving Systems Department. His research addresses a variety of topics relating to computer vision and perception: the statistics of natural scenes and their motion; articulated human motion pose estimation and tracking; the estimation of human body shape from images and video; the representation and detection of motion discontinuities; and the estimation of optical flow. His early work on optical flow has been widely used in Hollywood films. He also does research on neural engineering for brain-machine interfaces and neural prostheses. He is an honorary professor at the University of Tübingen, visiting professor at ETH Zürich, and adjunct professor (research) at Brown University. Read more
Katherine Kuchenbecker is a director at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, where she leads the Haptic Intelligence Department, which seeks to endow robots with astute haptic perception and invent methods for delivering realistic haptic feedback to users of telerobotic and virtual reality systems. Dr. Kuchenbecker’s research addresses the sensing, understanding, and display of tactile information for robots, teleoperation, and innovative interfaces. Her work combines inspiration from neuroscience with novel materials, machine learning, and robotic systems to uncover the principles that are central for haptic perception. Read more
Karol Myszkowski leads the High Dynamic Range Imaging group in the Computer Graphics Department at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics. The common denominator in all research efforts conducted by the group is the advancement of knowledge on image perception and development of imaging algorithms with embedded computational models of the human visual system. In this way, both computational performance and perceived image quality can be significantly improved. Two areas the group studies are stereoscopic 3D and image quality metrics, often considering perceptual effects—which we can experience but not measure physically—rather than physical effects. In particular, the group aims to exploit perceptual effects as a means to overcome physical limitations of display devices and to enhance apparent image quality. Read more
Gerard Pons-Moll is the head of the Emmy Noether independent research group "Real Virtual Humans" and senior researcher at the Max Planck for Informatics (MPII) in Saarbrücken. His research lies at the intersection of computer vision, machine learning and computer graphics -- with special focus on analyzing people in videos, and creating virtual human models by "looking" at real ones. His research has produced some of the most advanced statistical human body models of pose, shape, soft-tissue and clothing, as well as algorithms to track and reconstruct 3D people models from images, video, depth, and IMUs. His work has received several awards including the prestigious Emmy Noether Grant (2018), a Google Faculty Research Award (2019), a Facebook Reality Labs Faculty Award (2018), and recently the German Pattern Recognition Award (2019), and several best paper awards. Read more
Iyad Rahwan is a scientific director at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, where he leads the Center for Humans & Machines. He is also an honorary professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Technical University of Berlin. Previously, he was an Associate Professor of Media Arts & Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Rahwan's work lies at the intersection of computer science and human behavior, with a focus on the impact of Artificial Intelligence on society. His work appeared in major academic journals, including Science and Nature. Read more
Bernt Schiele is the founder of the Computer Vision and Multimodal Computing Department at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, and head of its Computer Vision research area. His group focuses on multimodal sensor processing as well as computer vision. In computer vision, they consider problems of 3D understanding of images and video, such as object class recognition, people detection and tracking, and understanding traffic scenes. In multimodal computing, they are focusing on human activity recognition as a means to study how ubiquitous or wearable computing may benefit from better sensor understanding. Their research also involves machine learning, which is instrumental to inferring higher-level information from noisy sensor data and handling large-scale multimodal databases and sensor streams. Read more
Hans-Peter Seidel directs the Computer Graphics Department at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, and is the Scientific Coordinator of the Cluster of Excellence on Multimodal Computing and Interaction. His research focuses on the development of new algorithms, closely meshing these with the capabilities of modern graphics hardware as well as a holistic view of the entire processing chain, from data acquisition and modeling through to image synthesis. This integrated view is now referred to as 3D image analysis and synthesis. Seidel has co-authored some 200 publications in the field, and more than 20 former members of his group have received offers for faculty positions at home or abroad. For his work, Seidel received the DFG Leibniz Prize in 2003 and the Eurographics Distinguished Career Award in 2012. Read more
We research fundamentals of intelligent embodied agents such as robots that learn to perceive and act through interaction with their environment. Our group investigates novel methods for learning the basic physical 3D understanding of dynamic environments up to complex tasks such as autonomous navigation and object manipulation from raw sensory measurements and environment interactions. Besides vision as a primary sensing modality, we also consider further sensing modalities such as tactile or proprioceptive sensing. Read more
Christian Theobalt is the head of the Graphics, Vision & Video research group at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, and a professor of computer science at Saarland University. He is also a Principal Investigator and member of the steering committee at the Intel Visual Computing Institute in Saarbrücken. The group’s research focuses on fundamental algorithmic problems that lie on the boundary between computer vision and computer graphics. Topics include free-viewpoint and 3D video, markerless optical motion capture, 3D image analysis and synthesis, image-based rendering, virtual and augmented reality, time-of-flight imaging, static and dynamic scene reconstruction, 3D computer vision, physically-based rendering, interaction, and machine learning for vision and graphics. Read more
Justus Thies is an independent research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (MPI-IS). His group ‘Neural Capture & Synthesis’ works at the intersection of computer graphics, computer vision, and machine learning. Specifically, he is interested in AI-based methods to capture and to (re-)synthesize the real world using commodity hardware to enable teleconferencing and collaborative working in VR/AR. He has a strong focus on marker-less motion capturing of facial performances, human bodies, and general non-rigid objects, as well as AI-based synthesis techniques that allow for photorealistic image and video synthesis. Read more
Yixin Zou will join MPI-SP in January 2023 as a tenure-track faculty member leading the Human-Centered Security and Privacy group. Her research spans human-computer interaction, privacy, and security, focusing on improving consumers’ adoption of protective behaviors and supporting the digital safety of at-risk populations. Her research has been recognized with the 2022 John Karat Usable Privacy and Security Student Research Award and best paper awards/honorable mentions at ACM CHI and SOUPS. In addition, her research has generated broader impacts on industry practice (e.g., Mozilla and NortonLifeLock) and public policy, including the rulemaking process for the California Consumer Privacy Act. Yixin received a Ph.D. in Information from the University of Michigan. Read more
