Marc Pollefeys

Marc Pollefeys is a Professor of Computer Science at ETH Zurich and Director of the Microsoft Spatial AI Zurich Lab. Before this he was on the faculty at the UNC-Chapel Hill. He obtained his PhD from the KULeuven in 1999. He is a Fellow of IEEE and ACM.

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 with collaborators at UNC Chapel Hill and ETH Zurich 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, with applications in AR and robotics. He has published over 300 peer-reviewed publications and holds several patents. His lab at ETH Zurich also developed the PixHawk auto-pilot which can be found in over half a million drones and he has co-founded several computer vision start-ups.