Prof. Dr. Marc Pollefeys

Short Bio

Marc Pollefeys is a Professor of Computer Science at ETH Zurich and the Director of the Microsoft Spatial AI Lab in Zurich. He is a Fellow of IEEE, ACM and ELLIS, as well as a member of the Academia Europaea. He obtained his PhD from the KU Leuven in 1999 and was a professor at UNC Chapel Hill before joining ETH Zurich.

He is best known for his work in 3D computer vision, having been the first to develop a software pipeline to automatically turn photographs into 3D models, but also works on robotics, graphics and machine learning problems. Other noteworthy projects he worked on are real-time 3D scanning with mobile devices, a real-time pipeline for 3D reconstruction of cities from vehicle mounted-cameras, camera-based self-driving cars and the first fully autonomous vision-based drone. At Microsoft he led the team developing the core computer vision algorithms for the HoloLens2 and Azure Spatial Anchors. Most recently his academic research is focusing on egocentric vision and robotics foundation models.

Curriculum vitae: short version (PDF), extended version (PDF)

Research interests

Computer vision; 3D-from-video; (self-)calibration; structure-from-motion; simultaneous-localization and mapping (SLAM); camera tracking; camera networks; active vision; robot vision; multiple view geometry; omnidirectional vision; projector-camera systems; image-based modeling and rendering; video-based rendering; computational photography; image and video analysis; applications of computer vision to archaeology, urban modeling, terrain modeling, human-computer interaction, robotics, entertainment, medecine, etc.
See research page

EPFL EE Distinguished Lecture, April 2014 (YouTube)

We work with Google on Project Tango (YouTube, NBC News)

Relive an event from multiple viewpoints: unstructured video-based rendering (webpage, includes an interactive demo)

Reconstructing Rome: 3 million images, 1 day, 1PC... read more about it (BBC, Chronicle of Higher Education, Newswise, physorg)

Postdoctoral researchers & senior researchers

• Dr. Dániel Béla Baráth
• Dr. Zuria Bauer
• Dr. Sunghwan Hong
• Dr. Kang Liao
• Dr. Olga Vysotska
• Dr. Haofei Xu

Current PhD students

Ata Celen, Jiaqi Chen, Nicole Damblon, Alexandros Delitzas, Tim Engelbracht, Elisabetta Fedele, Alexey Gavryushin, Mario Gomez Andreu, Xudong Jiang, Anusha Krishnan, Moyang Li, Philipp Lindenberger, Linfei Pan, Zador Pataki, Alexander Veicht, Jovana Videnovic, Boyang Sun, Lixin Xue, Yung-Hsu (Roy) Yang, Botao Ye, Zihan Zhu, Chenyangguang Zhang, Dingxi Zhang, Peter Zhang, Caterina Caccavella, Said Gürbüz, Mirlan Karimov, Tifanny Portela, Vanessa Sclearova, Jelena Trisovic, René Zurbrügg

Alumni/Past Group Members

• Graduated PhD Students: Dr. Jingyu Yan (Microsoft AI, Palo Alto, USA), Dr. Sudipta Sinha (Stack AV, Pullman, WA, USA), Prof. Dr. Seon Joo Kim (Yonsei University, Korea), Dr. Li Guan (Meta Reality Lab, Redmond, USA), Dr. Changchang Wu (Google, Seattle, USA), Dr. David Gallup (Waymo, Seattle, USA), Dr. Brian Clipp (Motional, Chapel Hill, USA), Dr. Rahul Raguram (Apple, Cupertino, USA), Dr. Roland Angst (ASUS, Taipei, Taiwan), Dr. Georges Baatz (Google, Zurich, Switzerland), Prof. Dr. Alexander G. Schwing (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA), Prof. Dr. Gim Hee Lee (National University of Singapore, Singapore), Dr. Jens Puwein (Vizrt, Zurich, Switzerland), Dr. Aparna Taneja (Google DeepMind, India), Dr. Lionel Heng (DSO National Laboratories, Singapore), Dr. Bernhard Zeisl (Google, Zurich, Switzerland), Dr. Petri Tanskanen (Astrivis, Zurich, Switzerland), Dr. Olivier Saurer (Astrivis, Zurich, Switzerland), Dr. Christian Häne (Meta, Bay Area, USA), Dr. Bastien Jacquet (Perception4D, Lyon, France), Dr. Andrea Cohen (Meta, Bay Area, USA), Dr. Fabio Maninchedda (Apple, Zurich, Switzerland), Dr. Lorenz Meier (Auterion, Arlington, Virginia, USA), Dr. Federico Camposeco (Meta, Bay Area, USA), Dr. Dominik Honegger (Hexagon Robotics, Zurich, Switzerland), Dr. Johannes Schönberger (Meta, Zurich, Switzerland), Prof. Dr. Yağız Aksoy (Simon Fraser University, Canada), Dr. Nikolay Savinov (OpenAI, London, UK), Dr. Pablo Speciale (Robotics and Perception Group, University of Zurich, Switzerland), Dr. Thomas Schöps (ScannedReality GmbH, Germany), Dr. Lukas Schneider (Mercedes-Benz AG, Stuttgart, Germany), Prof. Dr. Peidong Liu (Westlake University, China), Dr. Katarína Tóthová (NVIDIA, Zurich, Switzerland), Dr. Ian Cherabier (Siemens Healthineers, Lausanne, Switzerland), Dr. Daniel Thul (Synthesia, London, UK), Dr. Mihai Dusmanu (Anthropic, Zürich, Switzerland), Dr. Marcel Geppert (Magic Leap, Zürich, Switzerland), Dr. Luca Cavalli (Meta, Zürich, Switzerland), Dr. Rémi Pautrat (Microsoft Spatial AI Lab, Zürich, Switzerland), Dr. Silvan Weder (JOSEPHA, Zürich, Switzerland), Dr. Songyou Peng (Google DeepMind, San Francisco, USA), Dr. Paul-Edouard Sarlin (Google, Zürich, Switzerland), Dr. Sandro Lombardi (Maivico GmbH, Zürich, Switzerland), Dr. Taein Kwon (Meta Reality Labs, Zürich, Switzerland), Dr. Zuoyue Li (Google, Zürich, Switzerland), Dr. Cathrin Elich (Zeiss, Germany), Dr. Denys Rozumnyi (Meta, Zürich, Switzerland), Prof. Dr. Yao Feng (Tsinghua University, China), Dr. Petr Hrubý (KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden), Dr. Fangjinhua Wang (ByteDance Seed, Shanghai), Dr. Jonas Kulhanek (Apple, Czech Republic), Dr. Tobias Fischer (Apple, Cupertino, USA), Dr. Jonas Hein (Universitätsklinik Balgrist, Zürich, Switzerland), Dr. Shaohui Liu (Apple, Zürich, Switzerland), Dr. Haofei Xu (KE:SAI / ETH, Zürich, Switzerland)

• Former Postdocs & Senior Researchers: Prof. Dr. Jan-Michael Frahm (Meta, Seattle, USA), Prof. Dr. Philippos Mordohai (Stevens Institute of Technology, USA), Prof. Dr. Jean Sébastien Franco (Inria, Grenoble, France), Prof. Dr. Gabriel J. Brostow (University College London, UK), Prof. Dr. Roland Memisevic (Qualcomm, Toronto, Canada), Prof. Dr. Christopher Zach (Chalmers University, Gothenburg, Sweden), Prof. Dr. Kevin Köser (Kiel University, Kiel, Germany), Prof. Dr. Friedrich Fraundorfer (TU Graz, Graz, Austria), Prof. Dr. Jean-Charles Bazin (Rivian, Palo Alto, USA), Dr. Luca Ballan (Google, San Francisco, USA), Dr. Kalin Kolev (Bulgaria), Dr. Amaël Delaunoy (Apple, Seattle, USA), Dr. Lisa Magret Koch (University of Bern, Switzerland), Prof. Dr. Torsten Sattler (Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic), Dr. Vagia Tsiminaki (University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland (FHNW), Switzerland), Prof. Dr. Zhaopeng Cui (Zhejiang University, China), Dr. Ľubor Ladický (Apagom AG, Zurich, Switzerland), Prof. Dr. Viktor Larsson (Lund University, Sweden), Prof. Dr. Iro Armeni (Stanford University, USA), Prof. Dr. Martin R. Oswald (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands), Prof. Dr. Francis Engelmann (Università della Svizzera italiana (USI), Lugano, Switzerland), Prof. Dr. Hermann Blum (University of Bonn, Germany), Prof. Dr. Xi Wang (Ulm University, Germany)

Teaching

• Undergraduate: Linear Algebra (2009-now), Visual Computing (2008-2016, 2018-now), Computer Organization (2004-2005), Seminar on Computer Graphics and Vision (2008-now)
• Graduate: Computer Vision (2010-2016, 2018-now), 3D Vision (2004/2007/2008/2011-2016, 2018-now), Computational Photography (2008-2010), Mixed Reality (2019-now), ...