The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

The reconstruction of the 3D world from images is among the central challenges in computer vision. Starting in the 2000s, researchers have pioneered algorithms which can reconstruct camera motion and sparse feature-points in real-time. In my talk, I will show that one can autonomously fly quadrotors and reconstruct their environment using onboard color or RGB-D cameras. In particular, I will introduce spatially dense methods for camera tracking and reconstruction which do not require feature point estimation, which exploit all available input data and which recover dense geometry rather than sparse point clouds.

This is joint work with Jakob Engel, Jan Stuehmer, Martin R. Oswald, Frank Steinbruecker, Christian Kerl, Erik Bylow and Juergen Sturm.

Bio:
Daniel Cremers is a professor for Computer Science and Mathematics at the Technical University of Munich. He received Bachelor degrees in Mathematics (1994) and Physics (1994), and a Master's degree in Theoretical Physics (1997) from the University of Heidelberg. In 2002 he obtained a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Mannheim, Germany. Subsequently he spent two years as a postdoc at the University of California at Los Angeles and one year as a permanent researcher at Siemens Corporate Research (Princeton). From 2005 until 2009 he was associate professor at the University of Bonn, Germany. Since 2009 he holds the chair for Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition at the Technical University of Munich. Daniel is interested in computer vision and optimization with a particular focus on image-based 3D reconstruction, 3D shape analysis and convex variational methods. His publications received several awards, including the Best Paper of the Year 2003 by the Int. Pattern Recognition Society, the Olympus Award 2004 by the German Pattern Recognition Society and the 2005 UCLA Chancellor's Award for Postdoctoral Research. He is recipient of an ERC Starting Grant (2009), an ERC Proof of Concept Grant (2014) and an ERC Consolidator Grant (2014). In December 2010 the magazine Capital listed Prof. Cremers among "Germany's Top 40 Researchers Below 40".