Perceiving Systems, Computer Vision
74 results

Michael Black

Michael Black

Managing Director

My research spans Computer Vision, Machine Learning, and Graphics. I focus on computing and understanding motion in the world from video. I am particularly interested in human motion -- capturing it from video, using this to learn avatars, and synthesizing natural behavior in novel 3D scenes. I want to build virtual humans that behave and act like real humans.

Office: N3.019
+49 7071 601 1801


Aamir Ahmad

Aamir Ahmad

Tenure-track Professor, University of Stuttgart
Research Group Leader

I am a tenure-track professor (chair 'flight robotics') at the University of Stuttgart. I am also leading the Robot Perception Group at the Perceiving Systems Department. For further information, please visit my personal homepage https://www.aamirahmad.de/.

Office: N3.007
+49 7071 601 1816


Melanie Feldhofer

Melanie Feldhofer

Department Manager

Office: N3.018
+49 7071 601 1800


Nicole Overbaugh

Nicole Overbaugh

Administrative Assistant

Office: N3.018
+49 7071 601 1800


Victoria Fernandez Abrevaya

Victoria Fernandez Abrevaya

Postdoctoral Researcher

My current research focuses on 3D reconstruction and understanding of humans from 2D images as well as the context in which they are inserted, with a special interest in the human face.

Office: N3.015


Rick Akkerman

Rick Akkerman

Master's Thesis Student

Master's Student Intern


Mert Albaba

Mert Albaba

Ph.D. Student

I am an ELLIS PhD student jointly at ETH Zurich and the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, supervised by Prof. Otmar Hilliges and Prof. Michael Black. I am working on reinforcement learning and computer vision.


Tsvetelina Alexiadis

Tsvetelina Alexiadis

Data Team Lead

I am managing our capture facilities and the data collection at the capture hall of the Perceiving Systems Department. I work with computer vision researchers to design, coordinate, schedule and run human subjects trials involving body shape and motion analysis. To collect data we use several computer vision technologies, including our unique 4D body scanner and motion capture facility, and take anthropometric measurements. I am also responsible for ethics, data safety, and lab tours for visitors of the department.

Office: N3.016
+49 7071 601 1805


Nikos Athanasiou

Nikos Athanasiou

Ph.D. Student

Advisor: Michael Black

I am working in the intersection of Natural Language and Computer Vision. I am particularly interested on analyzing the connection between human motion and language.

Office: N3.004


Giorgio Becherini

Giorgio Becherini

Research Engineer


Simone Behrens

Simone Behrens

Guest Scientist

My research focus is body representation. I am interested in basic theoretical frameworks and mechanisms, but also in disturbed body representation. To this end, I conduct behavioral studies in patients with eating disorders or obesity, but also in healthy people.


Omri Ben-Dov

Omri Ben-Dov

Ph.D. Student

I'm a PhD student at the Perceiving Systems department of MPI-IS. The focus of my work is the development of a model representing the varying shapes and poses of rats, using a statistical analysis of 3D-scanned rats. This model can be used to automatically analyze the movement of rats from single-view videos.

Office: N3.004


Asuka Bertler

Asuka Bertler

Trial Coordinator

Office: N3 006
+49 7071 6011820


Shrisha Bharadwaj

Shrisha Bharadwaj

Master's Student Intern

I am a research intern at the Perceiving Systems department working with Victoria Fernandez-Abrevaya. I completed my masters degree in Machine Learning at the University of Tuebingen where I worked at the Autonomous Vision Group for my masters thesis, supervised by Prof. Dr. Andreas Geiger. My thesis focused on improving 3D reconstruction of static urban environments by exploring the benefits of depth information for radiance fields.


Supritam Bhattacharya

Supritam Bhattacharya

Research Engineer

Interested in making realistic human avatars.


Suraj Bhor

Suraj Bhor

Student Assistant

I am part of the Perceiving Systems department working as a student assistant. Currently, I am doing my master's in Quantitative Data Science at the University of Tübingen and my interests lie in self-supervised learning, statistical machine learning, and computer vision.


Siyuan Bian

Siyuan Bian

Master's Student Intern

I am now a master's student intern at Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems.


Elia Bonetto

Elia Bonetto

Guest Scientist

I am Elia Bonetto, a Ph.D. student at Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen, Germany. I am currently enrolled in the IMPRS-IS program under the supervision of Aamir Ahmad, Michael J. Black and Jörg Stückler. My research focuses on the synergy between computer vision and robotics, bridging sensing and action. I want to build systems capable to understand and interact with the world autonomously. My current research focus is on Active SLAM, especially in dynamic environments. I also worked on human body pose estimation, 3D semantic segmentation, autonomous vehicles and robotic arms.

Office: N3.008


Kiran Chhatre

Kiran Chhatre

Ph.D. Student


Alpar Cseke

Alpar Cseke

Guest Scientist

I am a Machine Learning MSc student at University of Tübingen. Previously I was a student assistant at the Perceiving Systems Department, and currently I am writing my Master's thesis here. My research focuses on using contact information for the reconstruction of human-object interactions in 3D from single-view images.


Hanz Cuevas Velasquez

Hanz Cuevas Velasquez

Research Engineer

Working at the intersection between digital humans, computer graphics and ML.


Abdelmouttaleb Dakri

Abdelmouttaleb Dakri

Guest Scientist

(Guest engineer - Visiting from INRIA Grenoble-ALpes' Morpheo team). In collaboration with Sergi Pujades and Marilyn Keller.


Radek Daněček

Radek Daněček

Ph.D. Student

Advisor: Michael Black

My goal is to combine the recently emerging field of geometric deep learning for geometry processing with the most effective deep learning concepts (such as GANs) in order to capture and/or generate the most realistic characters.

Office: N3.004


Markos Diomataris

Markos Diomataris

Ph.D. Student

My main research interests are related to the fusion of visual, structural and semantic information of humans towards achieving a higher level understanding of human behavior. I'm a doctoral fellow in the Max Planck ETH Center for Learning Systems (CLS), a joint program between ETH Zurich and Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. I am supervised by Prof. Otmar Hilliges, Dr. Michael Black and Prof. Bernt Schiele.


Enes Duran

Enes Duran

Student Assistant

I am a Machine Learning master's student at the University of Tübingen. My research is to develop motion priors for expressive body models.


Sai Kumar Dwivedi

Sai Kumar Dwivedi

Ph.D. Student

Ph.D. student supervised by Dr. Michael Black in the Perceiving Systems department of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen, Germany. I am interested in human perception for in-the-wild scenarios and also while interacting with objects.

Office: N3.004


Zicong (Alex) Fan

Zicong (Alex) Fan

Guest Scientist

Advisor: Michael Black

I am a doctoral student at ETH supervised by Dr. Michael J. Black and Prof. Otmar Hilliges. My main research interests lie in human-object interaction.


Haiwen Feng

Haiwen Feng

Ph.D. Student

I'm a Ph.D. student supervised by Prof. Dr. Michael J. Black, interested in computer vision, computer graphics, and machine learning with a focus on disentangled representation learning of "human and scenes".


Yao Feng

Yao Feng

Guest Scientist

Advisor: Michael Black

I joined Max Planck ETH Center for Learning Systems as a Ph.D. student in September 2019, where I am supervised by Michael Black and Marc Pollefeys.


Maria Paola Forte

Maria Paola Forte

Ph.D. Student

I am a Ph.D. student enrolled in the IMPRS-IS program under the supervision of Dr. Katherine J. Kuchenbecker and Dr. Michael J. Black. My main research interests lie in sign language reconstruction and recognition combining vision-based and sensor-based approaches.

Office: 5N14 @ MPI-IS Stuttgart
+49 711 689-2002


Valerian Fourel

Valerian Fourel

Student Assistant

I am a Student Assistant for the Data Team at the Perceiving Systems Lab. I am pursuing an M.Sc. of Quantitative Data Science at the Methods Center. My interest mainly lies in intelligent systems in immersive digital experience and Machine Learning for Remote Sensing.

+49 7071 601


Claudia Gallatz

Claudia Gallatz

Trial Coordinator

As a trial coordinator at the Perceiving Systems Department, I am mainly responsible for our human subject trials. My core task aims at the collection and processing of anthropometric data such as body shape and motion for scientific studies. Operating various cutting-edge scanning technologies, among which a unique 4D body scanner, is my daily task.

Office: N3.016
+49 7071 601 1803


Artur Grigorev

Artur Grigorev

Ph.D. Student

Ph.D. student working with garments.


Markus Höschle

Markus Höschle

Mechatronics Technician

Office: N3.016
+49 7071 601 1371


Marilyn Keller

Marilyn Keller

Ph.D. Student

I am a Ph.D. student in the Department of Perceiving Systems at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, advised by Professors Sergi Pujades and Michael J. Black. My work is focused on modelling the anatomic human skeleton and its shape variation among the population.

Office: N3.004


Pranav Khandelwal

Pranav Khandelwal

Guest Scientist

I received my PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill investigating the gliding behavior of flying lizards in their natural environment. My expertise lies at the interface of Physics, Biology, and Computer Vision allowing me to explore locomotion in Biological systems in real-world situations using non-invasive measurement techniques. I am specifically interested in how organisms sense and move in their complex natural habitat to perform their day-to-day activities.

Office: 4QR09


Hedvig Kjellström

Hedvig Kjellström

Affiliated Researcher

My research concerns learning models of perception and production of non-verbal communicative behavior. Such models can be used to create richer human-robot and human-avatar interaction, for medical diagnosis systems, and for contextual synthesis of different kinds of human behaviors, e.g., guiding synthesis of hand motion from body motion.


Muhammed Kocabas

Muhammed Kocabas

Ph.D. Student

Advisor: Michael Black

I am interested in computer vision and machine learning with a focus on human motion understanding.

Office: N3.004


Peter Kulits

Peter Kulits

Ph.D. Student


Arina Kuznetcova

Arina Kuznetcova

Student Assistant


Yu-Tang Liu

Yu-Tang Liu

Guest Scientist

Advisor: Aamir Ahmad

Yu Tang, Liu is interested in Robotics and Control System development. His current work focus on autonomous blimp navigation using reinforcement learning based methods.

Office: N3.008


Zhen Liu

Zhen Liu

I am a PhD visiting student from Mila and University of Montreal, working with in Perceiving Systems department with Prof. Michael Black on generative models for clothed human avatar. Previously I worked with Prof. Bernhard Schölkopf in Empirical Inference department on 3D generative models.


Taylor McConnell

Taylor McConnell

Data Collection and Processing Specialist

I am responsible for collecting and processing data captured with the vicon system, as well as troubleshooting the capture technologies. I am also involved with conducting web based experiments and web based data extractions.

Office: N3.003
+49 7071 601 424


Betty Mohler

Betty Mohler

Affiliated Researcher


Lea Müller

Lea Müller

Guest Scientist

Advisor: Michael Black

I am interested in learning human pose and shape from images and focus on a subset of challenging poses containing self-contact.


Tomasz Niewiadomski

Tomasz Niewiadomski

Student Assistant

Processing motion capture data, tagging and managing data, supporting the data team in setting up camera systems, data captures and events.


Ahmed Osman

Ahmed Osman

Guest Scientist

Advisor: Michael Black

My work spans both the research aspect of creating the world most realistic human body models and the development of computationally efficient and scalable software that enables learning such models from large scale data sets. I completed an MSc in Statistics at Imperial College London, MSc in Artificial Intelligence at the Uni. of Manchester and BEng in Mechatronics and Robotics at the University of Liverpool.

Office: N3.004


Mirela Ostrek

Mirela Ostrek

Ph.D. Student


Priyanka Patel

Priyanka Patel

Scientific Programmer


Benjamin Pellkofer

Benjamin Pellkofer

IT Sys Admin

Office: N 3.020
+49 7071 601 1821


Mathis Petrovich

Mathis Petrovich

Ph.D. Student

I am an ELLIS PhD student in the IMAGINE computer vision team of École des Ponts ParisTech (ENPC) and in the Perceiving Systems Department of Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (MPI-IS). I am co-advised by Gül Varol (ENPC) and Michael J. Black (MPI). My PhD topic is to generate realistic and diverse human body motion in a controllable way (given labels or text instructions), and to create text-motion joint latent spaces. Before that, I studied at the École normale supérieure Paris-Saclay where I obtained a BS degree in Computer Science and the MVA MS degree. I am currently doing an internship at NVIDIA in the Sanja Fidler team.


Gerard Pons-Moll

Gerard Pons-Moll

Affiliated Researcher

Are there people out there? How do they move? What is their body shape? What are they wearing? For machines to interact with humans and the physical world, we need to train them to answer these questions. My research is focused on combining ideas from computer vision and machine learning to enable machines to perceive humans. During my Ph.D. I worked mostly on geometric modelling and articulated tracking from images.


Eric Price

Eric Price

Guest Scientist

I am a guest scientist at the department of Perceiving Systems, developing multi-aerial vehicle intelligence for practical research application with prototypes built here at the institute. My current work involves model predictive control of airship formations.


Sergi Pujades

Sergi Pujades

Guest Scientist

My research aims at understanding the world through the capture and analysis of heterogeneous data (MRI, CT, Point clouds, images, ...) in order to create applied digital instruments, that allow, for example, to generate novel views from a scene, to infer the human shape from a clothed scan, or to predict the amount of adipose tissue of a person from surface observations. To address this challenge, I adopt the approaches of Computer Vision, Signal Processing, Computer Graphics and Statistical Models. My research is often multi-disciplinary, as I need to combine knowledge from these different domains.


Maria Alejandra Quiros-Ramirez

Maria Alejandra Quiros-Ramirez

Guest Scientist

What makes us perceive an interacting agent as 'human'? What does the external appearance of a person or virtual human tell us about them? How does the interaction with each other (virtual) humans affect our own actions and emotions? Can we apply all of this to improve life quality and mental health?


Tithi Rakshit

Tithi Rakshit

Student Assistant

Hello, I am Tithi Rakshit, a Student Research Assistant at the Perceiving Systems Department focused on processing motion capture data. I support the data team in cleaning, solving, retargeting, and editing motion capture data, as well as contributing to the set-up and maintenance of scanning systems.


Nitin Saini

Nitin Saini

Guest Scientist

I am interested in developing algorithms for 4D human/animal pose estimation using multiple moving cameras. I am also working on generating human/animal motion in virtual worlds.

Office: N3.008


Soubhik Sanyal

Soubhik Sanyal

Guest Scientist

Advisor: Michael Black

As a Ph.D. student at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, I have the privilege of being advised by Michael J. Black. Throughout my research journey, I've had the opportunity to collaborate closely with Timo Bolkart and Justus Theis. Additionally, during a research internship at Amazon Research, I was fortunate to receive valuable guidance from Javier Romero. My work centers on the generation and synthesis of digital humans, delving deep into the intricacies of generative modeling for 3D humans and their clothing, synthesizing human images and reconstructing from monocular images. My fascination for generative modeling has grown immensely in recent years, particularly in the realms of GANs and diffusion models. My research interests encompass the broader scope of generative modeling, aiming to bridge the gap between 2D and 3D human representations and unlock new possibilities in the digital world. Please visit my google scholar page for an updated list of publications. I did my masters from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India before joining my PhD where my focus was mainly on metric learning, face and object recognition.

Office: N3.004


Soyong Shin

Soyong Shin

Guest Scientist

I am a Ph.D. student intern from Carnegie Mellon University under the supervision of Professor Eni Halilaj. I am particularly interested in estimating 3D motion of humans through video and/or wearables and the integration of biomechanical principles with data-driven models.


Vanessa Sklyarova

Vanessa Sklyarova

Ph.D. Student


Omid Taheri

Omid Taheri

Ph.D. Student

My research is focused on understanding and modeling 3D world with computer vision and deep learning. Specifically, I am interested in generating precise body and hands motion in order to interact, grasp, and use novel 3D objects. My broad research view includes precise mocap using multimodal sensors (IMUs, Cameras, Touch and Flex Sensors, etc), 3D reconstruction from images, Human-Scene Interaction, and 3D representation.

Office: N3.004


Joachim Tesch

Joachim Tesch


Shashank Tripathi

Shashank Tripathi

Ph.D. Student

Advisor: Michael Black

I am a PhD student (2021-) at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems where I am advised by MPI Director Michael Black. I am interested in 3D modelling of human bodies with limited supervision.

Office: N3.004


Dimitris Tzionas

Dimitris Tzionas

Guest Scientist

I conduct research on the intersection of Computer Vision, Computer Graphics and Machine Learning. My motivation is to understand and model how people look, move and interact with the world and with each other to perform tasks. The long-term goal is to develop human-centered AI that perceives humans, understands their behavior and helps them to achieve their goals.


Gul Varol

Gul Varol

Guest Scientist

My research is focused on human understanding in videos, specifically action recognition, body shape and motion analysis, and sign languages.


Yandong Wen

Yandong Wen

Postdoctoral Researcher

I am currently conducting research with Prof. Michael Black as a postdoctoral researcher.


Yuliang Xiu

Yuliang Xiu

Ph.D. Student

I am currently a Ph.D. student under the supervision of Prof. Michael J. Black. My research lies in the intersection of vision and graphics, especially in 3D Human Digitalization.

Office: N3.004


Chenghao Xu

Chenghao Xu

Guest Scientist

I am a Master's student in Robotics at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft), the Netherlands. Before that, I obtained my Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering with Excellent Graduate Honor from the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech), Shenzhen, China. Currently, I am working as a student assistant at Robot Perception Group in the Perceiving Systems Department. My research interests lie in robot planning and perception, especially the intersection area of vision-based navigation and machine learning.


Hongwei Yi

Hongwei Yi

Ph.D. Student

Advisor: Michael Black

I am a PhD student (2020.09-) at the Perceiving Systems Department of Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, jointly supervised by Michael J. Black and Siyu Tang. Before that, I achieved my M.S. in computer applied technology from Peking University in 2020.07 and earned my B.S. in computer science and technology from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications in 2017.07. My main research focus is understanding our 3D world with computer vision and machine learning, including 3D human (face reconstruction, mark-less motion capture, motion reconstruction/modeling/generation/prediction), 3D scene reconstruction (Multi-View Stereo), and human-scene interaction.

Office: N3.004


Anastasios Yiannakidis

Anastasios Yiannakidis

Research Engineer


Haoran Yun

Haoran Yun

Guest Scientist

PhD student from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Early Stage Researcher in CLIPE Marie Curie Project.

+49 7071 601


Hao Zhang

Hao Zhang

Guest Scientist

I am a double degree Master's student at Tsinghua and RWTH Aachen University. Before that, I obtained my Bachelor's degree from Shanghai University of Electric Power. Currently, I am working as an intern at Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, supervised by Yandong Wen and Michael Black. My research interests lie in computer vision and robotics.


Yufeng Zheng

Yufeng Zheng

Guest Scientist

Advisor: Michael Black

I'm a Ph.D. student in the Max Planck ETH Center for Learning Systems, supervised by Prof. Otmar Hilliges and Dr. Michael Black. I'm currently located in Zurich. Generally, my interest lies in human-centric computer vision and graphics. More specifically, I’m working on 3D animatable models for human bodies and faces.


Silvia Zuffi

Silvia Zuffi

Guest Scientist

My research focuses on representing the appearance of people and animals in images and video sequences. I am particularly interested in 2D and 3D models that capture the variability in shape of articulated and deformable objects like the human and animal body. Previous work focused on color image reproduction, multispectral color imaging, readability of colored text.