BARCELONA, Spain - Jakob Engel, PhD student in the Computer Vision Group at the Technical University of Munich, Germany, has received the EMVA Young Professional Award 2014. Engel received the award for his novel approach to real-time visual odometry 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 example, in 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 the utilization of 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.

The EMVA Young Professional Award is an annual award to honor the outstanding and innovative work of a student or a young professional in the field of machine vision or image processing. The award recipient was announced on May 17 during the 12^th EMVA Business Conference in Vienna, Austria, where he also had the opportunity to present his work as part of the regular conference program.

The 13^th EMVA Business Conference will take place in spring 2015 in Athens, Greece.