ERC Consolidator Grant for Bastian Leibe

Prof. Bastian Leibe (i8, Computer Vision) received a Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) for his project “DeeViSe – Deep Learning for Dynamic 3D Visual Scene Understanding”. The Department of Computer Science now holds 20 percent of all ERC Grant recipients at RWTH Aachen.

Seeing is the most important sense, with which we can perceive our environment. Similarly, it is important for many technical systems, such as intelligent vehicles, to obtain a comprehensive visual understanding of the scene through the analysis of camera images. The associated research area, Computer Vision, has made significant advances in recent years due the use of Deep Learning methods. Current Deep Learning approaches do not comprehensively consider the 3D structure of the environment in their understanding of the scene and are strongly restricted in their use as they require a large amount of elaborately prepared training data.

The objective of Bastian Leibe’s project “DeeViSe – Deep Learning for Dynamic 3D Visual Scene Understanding” is to remove these restrictions and to provide Deep Learning approaches with an understanding for what it means to move through a dynamic changing 3D world. An additional important aspect is developing learning approaches that can be more easily scaled, which can independently learn from video data and are thus less dependent on training data painstakingly annotated by humans, than current methods. The project’s results can be directly applied in autonomous driving and mobile robotics.

Bastian Leibe studied computer science at the University of Stuttgart and Georgia Institute of Technology and earned his doctorate at ETH Zürich. He first came to RWTH Aachen in 2008 as a junior professor. He has been the university professor for computer vision since 2011. This is his second ERC Grant. He received an ERC Starting Grant in 2012.