Short Bio

Marc Pollefeys is a Professor of Computer Science at ETH Zurich and the Director of the Microsoft Mixed Reality and AI Lab in Zurich where he works with a team of scientists and engineers to develop advanced perception capabilities for HoloLens and Mixed Reality. He was elected Fellow of the IEEE in 2012. 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. Most recently his academic research has focused on combining 3D reconstruction with semantic scene understanding.

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] (incudes 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

Current PhD students

Taein Kwon, Zuoyue Li, Paul-Edouard Sarlin, Denys Rozumnyi, Cathrin Elich, Haofei Xu, Tobias Fischer, Jonas Hein, Yao Feng, Fangjinhua Wang, Boyang Sun, Linfei Pan, Shaohui Liu, Petr Hruby, Jiaqi Chen, Philipp Lindenberger, Zador Pataki, Botao Ye

Alumni/Past Group Members

  • Graduated PhD Students: Jingyu Yan, Prof. Seon Joo Kim (Yonsei University), Sudipta Sinha (Microsoft), Li Guan (WormpexAI), Changchang Wu (Waymo), Brian Clipp (Kitware), David Gallup (Waymo), Rahul Raguram (Apple), Roland Angst (ASUS), Georges Baatz (Google), Prof. Alexander Schwing (UIUC), Jens Puwein (VizRT), Prof. Gim Hee Lee (NUSingapore), Aparna Taneja (Google), Lionel Heng (DSO Singapore), Bernhard Zeisl (Google), Christian Haene (Google), Olivier Saurer (Astrivis), Petri Tanskanen (Astrivis), Lorenz Meier(Auterion), Dominik Honegger (Leica Geosystem), Federico Camposeco Paulsen (Facebook), Andrea Cohen (Facebook), Prof. Yagiz Aksoy (SFU), Nikolay Savinov (Deepmind), Johannes Sch ̈onberger (Microsoft), Pablo Speciale (Microsoft), Thomas Schoeps, Lukas Schneider (Daimler), Prof. Peidong Liu (Westlake U.), Daniel Thul (Synthesia), Katarina Tothova, Ian Cherabier (INAIT), Mihai Dusmanu (Microsoft), Marcel Geppert (Magic Leap), Luca Cavalli (Meta), Sandro Lombardi (Astrivis), Silvan Weder (JOSEPHA), Remi Pautrat (Microsoft)

  • Former Postdocs: Prof. Viktor Larsson (Lund U.), Lubor Ladicky (Apagom AG), Prof. Zhaopeng Cui (Zhejiang U.), Prof. Torsten Sattler (Chalmers U./CTU), Vaggia Tsiminaki (IBM Research), Lisa Koch, Amael Delaunoy (Apple), Luca Ballan (Google), Jean-Charles Bazin (Apple), Kalin Kolev, Kevin Koser (GEOMAR), Prof. Friedrich Fraundorfer (TUGraz), Prof. Christopher Zach (Chalmers U), Roland Memisevic (20Bneurons), Prof. Gabriel Brostow (UCL/Niantic), Prof. Jean-Sebastien Franco (ENSIMAG/INRIA), Prof. Jan-Michael Frahm (UNC-Chapel Hill/FB), Prof. Philipos Mordohai (Stevens Institute), Prof. Iro Armeni (Stanford University)

Main collaborators

  • Jan-Michael Frahm ( University of North Carolina )
  • Otmar Hilliges, Markus Gross (ETH Zurich)

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), ...