Thomas Brox

Thomas Brox (born 1976) is a computer scientist and professor of pattern recognition and image processing at the University of Freiburg, where he heads the Computer Vision Group. His research is in computer vision and machine learning, including optical flow, visual representation learning and deep neural networks.

Research on optical-flow estimation that Brox published with Andrés Bruhn, Nils Papenberg and Joachim Weickert received the Longuet-Higgins Best Paper Award at the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) in 2004 and the Koenderink Prize in 2014. Brox has been a full member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities since 2020.

Academic career

Brox received his doctorate in computer science from Saarland University in 2005. He subsequently worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bonn, headed the Intelligent Systems Group at TU Dresden as a temporary professor, and was a postdoctoral researcher in Jitendra Malik's computer vision group at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2010, he joined the University of Freiburg, where he became professor of pattern recognition and image processing and head of the Computer Vision Group.

Research

An early focus of Brox's research was optical flow, the estimation of apparent motion between images. In 2004, Brox, Bruhn, Papenberg and Weickert proposed a variational optical-flow method combining brightness and gradient constancy with a discontinuity-preserving smoothness constraint and a nonlinear, multi-resolution optimization scheme. The work received the Longuet-Higgins Best Paper Award at ECCV 2004 and, ten years later, the Koenderink Prize.

In the same year, Brox was a co-author of FlowNet, which formulated optical-flow estimation as a supervised learning problem for convolutional neural networks and used entirely synthetically generated training data.

Awards and memberships

Longuet-Higgins Best Paper Award, ECCV, 2004, with Andrés Bruhn, Nils Papenberg and Joachim Weickert. Koenderink Prize, ECCV, 2014, for the 2004 optical-flow paper, with Bruhn, Papenberg and Weickert. Full member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities since 2020.