The EMVA Young Professional Award 2014 goes to Jakob Engel, PhD Student in the Computer Vision Group at the Technical University of Munich, Germany for his novel approach to real-time visual odometry for a monocular camera. Engel, who is 27 years old, received his Bachelor degree in Computer Science in 2009 and his Masters degree in December 2011 at the Technical University of Munich.
Novel visual odometry method for a monocular camera
In his awarded work Engel developed a novel, semi-dense method to estimate the 3D movement of a monocular camera from the recorded video and simultaneously estimating the 3D structure of the environment. The underlying task is called (monocular) visual odometry, and is used for e.g., augmented- or virtual reality applications or the autonomous navigation of robots. In contrast to the classical keypoint-based approach, the proposed semi-dense, direct formulation allows to utilize all information in the video, achieving superior tracking accuracy and much more detailed reconstructions, while still running in real-time even on a modern smartphone.
Young professional award part of EMVA Business Conference
The EMVA Young Professional Award is an annual award to honour the outstanding and innovative work of a student or a young professional in the field of machine vision or image processing. It is the goal of the EMVA to further support innovation in the machine vision industry, to contribute to the important aspect of dedicated machine vision education and to provide a bridge between research and industry. With the annual Young Professional Award the EMVA intends to specifically encourage students to focus on challenges in the field of machine vision and to apply latest research results and findings in computer vision to the practical needs of the industry. The awardee was announced on 17 May during the 12th EMVA Business Conference in Vienna, Austria, where he also had the opportunity to present his work as part of the regular conference program.
Back to News
