The CV-HCI lab is part of the Institut for Anthropomatics of the Department of Computer Science at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (formerly Universität Karlsruhe (TH)).

Our research focuses on the development of novel techniques for the visual and audio-visual perception of humans and their activities, in order to facilitate perceptive multimodal interfaces, humanoid robots and smart environments. Our work thus includes research on 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. Currently the main application scenarios we are working on are human-friendly humanoid robots and smart environments.

We are a member of the German Collaborative Research Center 588 on “Humanoid Robots”. In this project we contribute key components for the visual perception of people and their activities to the Karlsruhe humanoid robot. We are also member of the Franco-German research project Quaero, where we contribute to video-based and multimodal multimedia analysis, in particular the detection and recognition of people, events and genres in images and video. In the European CHIL project, we have extensively worked on audio-visual perception of people in and for smart environments.

The CV-HCI lab is directed by Prof. Dr. Rainer Stiefelhagen, who also directs the Perceptual User Interfaces research group at the Fraunhofer Institute of Optronics, System Technologies and Image Exploitation (IOSB) in Karlsruhe.