My research focuses on the development of novel techniques for the visual and audio-visual perception of humans and their activities, in order to build perceptive human-friendly systems.

I am particularly interested in building complete human-friendly systems, such as human-friendly robots, smart environment and assistive technology for people with visual impairments. I'm also interested in automatic analysis of multimedia content and video surveillance applications.

My team and I have been working on a number of perception components including person tracking, person identification, recognition of pointing gestures, estimation of head orientation and focus of attention, as well as audio-visual scene and activity analysis. 

In addition to my research group on "Computer Vision for Human-Computer Interaction (CV-HCI)" at the Karlsruhe Institute for Technology (formerly Universität Karlsruhe (TH)), I'm head of the KIT's Study Center for Visually Impaired Students (SZS)".

I also closely collaborate with the Perceptual User Interfaces research group  at the Fraunhofer Institute for Optronics, System Technologies and Image Exploitation - IOSB in Karlsruhe.

I'm co-founder of Videmo Intelligente Videoanalyse GmbH Co. KG. Videmo develops innovative software and algorithms for automatic video analysis in a wide range of application areas such as security, customer analysis, traffic monitoring and health care.

• Please see the list of ongoing projects on my research groups' homepage

• I was member of the Franco-German project Quaero. Here, we contributed to video-based and multimodal multimedia analysis, in particular the detection and recognition of people, events and genres in images and videos.
• In 2007, I was awarded an Attract project funded by the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft. It was called "Visual perception of people - interaction in and with attentive rooms". Work on this project was conducted with my research group at the Fraunhofer Institute for Optronics, System Technologies and Image Exploitation - IOSB in Karlsruhe
• I was member of the German Research Center on Humanoid Robots (SFB 588) In this project we contributed the key components for the visual perception of people and their activities to the Karlsruhe humanoid robot.
• I was member of the coordination team of CHIL - Computers in the Human Interaction Loop. Here, we have extensively worked on audio-visual perception of people in and for smart environments.

• Please see the publications page of my research group
• You could also search my DBLP entry or Google Scholar citations
• Some videos showing our work can be found here

• Please see the respective page on my research group's website
• Please see the a list of currently offered topics for Studien- / Diplomarbeiten.
• Here is a list of Studien- / Diplomarbeiten  resp. bachelor and master theses I have supervised so far.

• Program Co-Chair of the The 9th IEEE International Conference on Face and Gesture Recognition, Santa Barbara, CA, March 21-25, 2011.
• Workshop Co-Chair of the The 33rd Annual German Conference on Artificial Intelligence (KI 2010), Karlsruhe, Germany, September, 2010.
• Workshop Co-Chair of the The Twelth International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces and Workshop on Machine Learning for Multi-modal Interaction, ICMI-MLMI'10, Beijing, China, November 8-12, 2010.
• Workshop Co-Chair of the First International Workshop on Computer Vision for Human-Robot Interaction (CVforHRI 2010), in conjunction with the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2010 Cambridge, MA, November 2-6, 2009.
• Associate Editor (Program Committee Member) of 2010 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2010), Taipei, Taiwan, on October 18-22, 2010.
• Technical Program Committee Member of ICPR 2010
• Technical Program Committee Member of ACM Multimedia 2010
• Program Co-Chair of the The Eleventh International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces and Workshop on Machine Learning for Multi-modal Interaction, ICMI-MLMI'09, Cambridge, MA, November 2-6, 2009.
• Technical Program Committee Member of the 6th IEEE Int. Conference on Advanced Video and Signal Based Surveillance - AVSS, Genoa, Italy, September 2009.
• Technical Program Committee Member of ACM Multimedia 2009,Oct. 19-24, 2008, Beijing, China.
• Program Committe Member of the Second IEEE Workshop on CVPR for Human Communicative Behavior Analysis
• Finance-Chair of the 2008 ACM/IEEE 10th International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces, October 20-22, 2008, Chania, Crete, Greece.
• Co-Chair of the 5th Joint Workshop on Machine Learning and Multimodal Interaction, 8-10 September 2008 Utrecht, The Netherlands.
• Panelist at the Special Session on Multi-Sensor HCI for Smart Environments, at the 8th IEEE Int'l Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG 2008), September 17-19, 2008, Amsterdam, Netherlands.
• Technical Program Committee Member of ACM Multimedia 2008,Oct. 27-Nov.1, 2008, Vancouver, BC, Canada.
• Program Committee Member of the Workshop on Multi-camera and Multi-modal Sensor Fusion Algorithms and Applications , in conjunction with the 10th European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), October 18, 2008, Marseille, France.
• Program Committee Member of the Workshop on Facial and Bodily Expressions for Control and Adaptation of Games (ECAG'08), the 8th IEEE Int'l Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG 2008), September 16, 2008, Amsterdam, Netherlands.
• Scientific Committee Member of the 4th IEEE Tutorial and Research Workshop Perception and Interactive Technologies for Speech-Based Systems (PIT08), June 16-18, 2008, Kloster Irsee, Germany.
• Program Committee Member of the International Conference on Cognitive Sytems (CogSys 2008), April 2-4, 2008, Karlsruhe, Germany.
• Guest Editor of the Journal on Language Resources and Evaluation, Special Issue on "Multimodal Corpora for Modeling Human Multimodal Behaviour", No. 3-4, Dec. 2007, Springer.
• Co-Chair of the CLEAR 2007 evaluation workshop, Baltimore, USA, May 2007.
• Area-Chair, 4th Joint Workshop on Multimodal Interaction and Related Machine Learning Algorithms, MLMI 2007, Brno, Czech Republic
• Program Committee Member of ACM Multimedia 2007, Augsburg, Germany.
• Co-Chair of the CLEAR 2006 evaluation workshop, Southampton, UK, April 2006.
• Session Organizer and Chair: "Multisensor Fusion for Human-Activity Analysis", IEEE International Conference on Multisensor Fusion and Integration for Intelligent Systems, Heidelberg, September 2006.
• Area Chair, International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces 2006, Banff, Canada, November 2006
• Program Committee Member, International Conference on Pattern Recognition, ICPR 2006, Hong Kong, China, August 2006
• Program Committee Member, 3rd Joint Workshop on Multimodal Interaction and Related Machine Learning Algorithms, Washington, DC, USA, May 2006.
• Technical Committee Member, Tutorial and Research Workshop on Perception and Interactive Technologies, June 2006, Kloster Irsee, Germany
• Workshop & Tutorial Chair, International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces, Trento, Italy, October 2005
• Program Committee Member, 2nd Joint Workshop on Multimodal Interaction and Related Machine Learning Algorithms, Edinburgh, UK, July 2005.
• Technical Committee Member, IEEE Int. Workshop on Modeling People and Human Interaction (PHI'05), in conjunction with Int. Conf. On Computer Vision, Bejing, China, Oct. 2005
• Co-organizer and Co-chair, Workshop on "Building Humanoid Heads", Humanoids 2004, Los Angeles, CA, Nov. 2004
• Program Committee Member, Sixth International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces, ICMI 2004, Penn State University, State College, PA, USA, Oktober 2004.
• Technical Committee Member, Pointing '04 ICPR workshop, Satellite workshop to IEEE International Conference on Pattern Recognition ICPR, Cambridge, UK, August 2004