Alexander Hornung obtained his Diploma and Ph.D. in Computer Science, both summa cum laude, in 2003 and 2008 at RWTH Aachen University. His Ph.D. supervisor was Leif Kobbelt. Between 2008-2009 he was a postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zurich in the Computer Graphics Laboratory led by Markus Gross, and in 2009 he joined Disney Research Zurich. Since 2010 Alexander is a senior research scientist at Disney Research, leading the Imaging and Video Processing group.
Alexander’s research is on the interface between Computer Graphics and Computer Vision. He has made significant contributions to such diverse areas as video and light field processing, stereoscopy, image-based rendering, 3D reconstruction, and 2D animation. He has published his work at the highest level in these fields, including several papers at top Eurographics and ACM SIGGRAPH events.
Alexander started his research in image-based modeling and multi-view stereo reconstruction where he developed new photo-consistency measures and explored their highly efficient evaluation on the GPU. These measures provided the foundation for a graph-cut based volumetric multi-view stereo reconstruction technique which then led to the development of a solution for the reconstruction of watertight meshes from unstructured point clouds. This was the first surface reconstruction technique not requiring consistent surface normals which is robust to highly non-uniform sampling.
Besides 3D reconstruction, Alexander also explored other innovative approaches for processing image and video data. His work on the animation of 2D characters from a single image has inspired a significant body of followup work. He later developed techniques for content-aware image and video warping in the context of video retargeting, stereoscopic disparity remapping, and 2D to 3D video conversion.
In his more recent work he developed new methods for a variety of problems such as line drawing vectorization, stereoscopic camera control for 3D gaming applications and multi-perspective stereoscopic rendering.
Alexander’s research contributions are characterized by their topical breadth and technical depth. He is a highly active young researcher who has already published several influential papers in Computer Graphics.
Eurographics is pleased to recognize Alexander Hornung with the 2012 Young Researcher Award.