Research

​​​​​​The Visual Computing and Artificial Intelligence Department investigates foundational research problems at the intersection of Computer Graphics, Computer Vision and Artificial Intelligence. It is our long term vision to develop entirely new ways to capture, represent, synthesize and simulate models of the real world at highest detail, robustness, and efficiency. To achieve this long term goal, we develop new concepts that rethink and unite established approaches from Computer Graphics and Computer Vision with concepts from Artificial Intelligence, in particular Machine Learning. 

Our work lays the foundations for a new of thinking about computer graphics, and a new way of uniting and enriching the real world with computer graphics technology. It also lays the foundations for advanced methods to better perceive, understand and interpret the complex real world in motion surrounding us from visual observation, which is an essential capability of future intelligent computing systems that safely and intuitively interact with humans and the human world. 

Before becoming the director of this department, Christian Theobalt was the head of the indepedent research group Graphics, Vision & Video at MPI for Informatics. Please follow the link here to the research areas of the former group, which will be part of the larger research scope of the new department. More information will follow soon.

• Virtual Humans
• Neural Representations and Neural Rendering
• Deep Learning for Visual Computing
• AI for Graphics and Vision
• Visual Scene Understanding
• 3D and 4D Reconstruction
• Multi-modal Reconstruction and Synthesis
• Free-viewpoint and 3D Video
• Marker-less Motion and Performance Capture
• 3D Image Analysis and Synthesis
• Inverse Rendering
• Animation 
• Geometric Modeling
• Virtual and Augmented Reality
• New Sensors for Visual Computing
• Physically-based and Image-based Rendering
• New Methods for Man-Machine Interaction