Computer Vision

Extracting meaning and building representations of visual objects and events in the world.

Our main research themes cover the areas of deep learning and artificial intelligence for object and action detection, classification and scene understanding, robotic vision and object manipulation, 3D processing and computational geometry, as well as simulation of physical systems to enhance machine learning systems.

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Researchers
Awards
- AWARD Best Paper - Honorable Mention Award at WACV 2021
  Date: January 6, 2021
  Awarded to: Rushil Anirudh, Suhas Lohit, Pavan Turaga
  MERL Contact: Suhas Lohit
  Research Areas: Computational Sensing, Computer Vision, Machine Learning
  Brief
  - A team of researchers from Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and Arizona State University (ASU) received the Best Paper Honorable Mention Award at WACV 2021 for their paper "Generative Patch Priors for Practical Compressive Image Recovery".
    
    The paper proposes a novel model of natural images as a composition of small patches which are obtained from a deep generative network. This is unlike prior approaches where the networks attempt to model image-level distributions and are unable to generalize outside training distributions. The key idea in this paper is that learning patch-level statistics is far easier. As the authors demonstrate, this model can then be used to efficiently solve challenging inverse problems in imaging such as compressive image recovery and inpainting even from very few measurements for diverse natural scenes.
- AWARD MERL Researchers win Best Paper Award at ICCV 2019 Workshop on Statistical Deep Learning in Computer Vision
  Date: October 27, 2019
  Awarded to: Abhinav Kumar, Tim K. Marks, Wenxuan Mou, Chen Feng, Xiaoming Liu
  MERL Contact: Tim K. Marks
  Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Machine Learning
  Brief
  - MERL researcher Tim Marks, former MERL interns Abhinav Kumar and Wenxuan Mou, and MERL consultants Professor Chen Feng (NYU) and Professor Xiaoming Liu (MSU) received the Best Oral Paper Award at the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) 2019 Workshop on Statistical Deep Learning in Computer Vision (SDL-CV) held in Seoul, Korea. Their paper, entitled "UGLLI Face Alignment: Estimating Uncertainty with Gaussian Log-Likelihood Loss," describes a method which, given an image of a face, estimates not only the locations of facial landmarks but also the uncertainty of each landmark location estimate.
- AWARD CVPR 2011 Longuet-Higgins Prize
  Date: June 25, 2011
  Awarded to: Paul A. Viola and Michael J. Jones
  Awarded for: "Rapid Object Detection using a Boosted Cascade of Simple Features"
  Awarded by: Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)
  MERL Contact: Michael J. Jones
  Research Area: Machine Learning
  Brief
  - Paper from 10 years ago with the largest impact on the field: "Rapid Object Detection using a Boosted Cascade of Simple Features", originally published at Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2001).
See All Awards for MERL
News & Events
- TALK [MERL Seminar Series 2026] Zac Manchester presents talk titled Is locomotion really that hard… and other musings on the virtues of simplicity
  Date & Time: Tuesday, January 20, 2026; 12:00 PM
  Speaker: Zac Manchester, MIT
  MERL Host: Pedro Miraldo
  Research Areas: Computer Vision, Control, Optimization, Robotics
  Abstract
  - For decades, legged locomotion was a challenging research topic in robotics. In the last few years, however, both model-based and reinforcement-learning approaches have not only demonstrated impressive performance in laboratory settings, but are now regularly deployed "in the wild." One surprising feature of these successful controllers is how simple they can be. Meanwhile, Art Bryson’s timeless advice to control engineers, “Be wise – linearize,” seems to be increasingly falling out of fashion and at risk of being forgotten by the next generation of practitioners. This talk will discuss several recent works from my group that try to push the limits of how simple locomotion (and, possibly, manipulation) controllers for general-purpose robots can be from several different viewpoints, while also making connections to state-of-the-art generative AI methods like diffusion policies.
- NEWS MERL Researchers at NeurIPS 2025 presented 2 conference papers, 5 workshop papers, and organized a workshop.
  Date: December 2, 2025 - December 7, 2025
  Where: San Diego
  MERL Contacts: Petros T. Boufounos; Anoop Cherian; Radu Corcodel; Stefano Di Cairano; Chiori Hori; Christopher R. Laughman; Suhas Lohit; Pedro Miraldo; Saviz Mowlavi; Kuan-Chuan Peng; Arvind Raghunathan; Diego Romeres; Abraham P. Vinod; Pu (Perry) Wang
  Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Computational Sensing, Computer Vision, Control, Data Analytics, Dynamical Systems, Machine Learning, Multi-Physical Modeling, Optimization, Robotics, Signal Processing, Speech & Audio
  Brief
  - MERL researchers presented 2 main-conference papers and 5 workshop papers, as well as organized a workshop, at NeurIPS 2025.
    
    Main Conference Papers:
    
    1) Sorachi Kato, Ryoma Yataka, Pu Wang, Pedro Miraldo, Takuya Fujihashi, and Petros Boufounos, "RAPTR: Radar-based 3D Pose Estimation using Transformer", Code available at: https://github.com/merlresearch/radar-pose-transformer
    
    2) Runyu Zhang, Arvind Raghunathan, Jeff Shamma, and Na Li, "Constrained Optimization From a Control Perspective via Feedback Linearization"
    
    Workshop Papers:
    
    1) Yuyou Zhang, Radu Corcodel, Chiori Hori, Anoop Cherian, and Ding Zhao, "SpinBench: Perspective and Rotation as a Lens on Spatial Reasoning in VLMs", NeuriIPS 2025 Workshop on SPACE in Vision, Language, and Embodied AI (SpaVLE) (Best Paper Runner-up)
    
    2) Xiaoyu Xie, Saviz Mowlavi, and Mouhacine Benosman, "Smooth and Sparse Latent Dynamics in Operator Learning with Jerk Regularization", Workshop on Machine Learning and the Physical Sciences (ML4PS)
    
    3) Spencer Hutchinson, Abraham Vinod, François Germain, Stefano Di Cairano, Christopher Laughman, and Ankush Chakrabarty, "Quantile-SMPC for Grid-Interactive Buildings with Multivariate Temporal Fusion Transformers", Workshop on UrbanAI: Harnessing Artificial Intelligence for Smart Cities (UrbanAI)
    
    4) Yuki Shirai, Kei Ota, Devesh Jha, and Diego Romeres, "Sim-to-Real Contact-Rich Pivoting via Optimization-Guided RL with Vision and Touch", Worskhop on Embodied World Models for Decision Making
    
    5) Mark Van der Merwe and Devesh Jha, "In-Context Policy Iteration for Dynamic Manipulation", Workshop on Embodied World Models for Decision Making
    
    Workshop Organized:
    
    MERL members co-organized the Multimodal Algorithmic Reasoning (MAR) Workshop (https://marworkshop.github.io/neurips25/). Organizers: Anoop Cherian (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Kuan-Chuan Peng (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Suhas Lohit (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Honglu Zhou (Salesforce AI Research), Kevin Smith (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and Joshua B. Tenenbaum (Massachusetts Institute of Technology).
See All News & Events for Computer Vision
Research Highlights
Internships
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Openings
- CI0177: Postdoctoral Research Fellow - Agentic AI
See All Openings at MERL
Recent Publications
- Yataka, R., Wang, P., Boufounos, P.T., Takahashi, R., "Indoor Multi-View Radar Object Detection via 3D Bounding Box Diffusion", AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, January 2026.
  BibTeX TR2026-019 PDF Software
  - @inproceedings{Yataka2026jan,
  - author = {Yataka, Ryoma and Wang, Pu and Boufounos, Petros T. and Takahashi, Ryuhei},
  - title = {{Indoor Multi-View Radar Object Detection via 3D Bounding Box Diffusion}},
  - booktitle = {AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence},
  - year = 2026,
  - month = jan,
  - url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2026-019}
  - }
- Hori, C., Masuyama, Y., Jain, S., Corcodel, R., Jha, D.K., Romeres, D., Le Roux, J., "Robot Confirmation Generation and Action Planning Using Long-context Q-Former Integrated with Multimodal LLM", IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU), December 2025.
  BibTeX TR2025-167 PDF
  - @inproceedings{Hori2025dec,
  - author = {Hori, Chiori and Masuyama, Yoshiki and Jain, Siddarth and Corcodel, Radu and Jha, Devesh K. and Romeres, Diego and {Le Roux}, Jonathan},
  - title = {{Robot Confirmation Generation and Action Planning Using Long-context Q-Former Integrated with Multimodal LLM}},
  - booktitle = {IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU)},
  - year = 2025,
  - month = dec,
  - url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-167}
  - }
- Xiang, X., Peng, K.-C., Lohit, S., Jones, M.J., Zhang, J., "Towards Open-Vocabulary Multimodal 3D Object Detection with Attributes", British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC), November 2025.
  BibTeX TR2025-162 PDF Video Data Presentation
  - @inproceedings{Xiang2025nov,
  - author = {{{Xiang, Xinhao and Peng, Kuan-Chuan and Lohit, Suhas and Jones, Michael J. and Zhang, Jiawei}}},
  - title = {{{Towards Open-Vocabulary Multimodal 3D Object Detection with Attributes}}},
  - booktitle = {British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC)},
  - year = 2025,
  - month = nov,
  - url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-162}
  - }
- Gambill, P., Jha, D.K., Krishnamoorthy, B., Raghunathan, A., Yerazunis, W.S., "DamageEst: Accurate Estimation of Damage for Repair using Additive Manufacturing", Solid Freeform Fabrication Symposium (SFF), November 2025, pp. 1506-1526.
  BibTeX TR2025-158 PDF Presentation
  - @inproceedings{Gambill2025nov,
  - author = {{{Gambill, Patrick and Jha, Devesh K. and Krishnamoorthy, Bala and Raghunathan, Arvind and Yerazunis, William S.}}},
  - title = {{{DamageEst: Accurate Estimation of Damage for Repair using Additive Manufacturing}}},
  - booktitle = {36th Annual International Solid Freeform Fabrication Symposium – An Additive Manufacturing Conference},
  - year = 2025,
  - pages = {1506--1526},
  - month = nov,
  - url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-158}
  - }
- Nikovski, D.N., "Observation-Based Inverse Kinematics for Visual Servo Control", 22nd International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics (ICINCO), October 2025.
  BibTeX TR2025-153 PDF
  - @inproceedings{Nikovski2025oct,
  - author = {Nikovski, Daniel N.},
  - title = {{Observation-Based Inverse Kinematics for Visual Servo Control}},
  - booktitle = {22nd International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics (ICINCO)},
  - year = 2025,
  - month = oct,
  - url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-153}
  - }
- Yataka, R., Wang, P., Boufounos, P.T., Takahashi, R., "Radar-Conditioned 3D Bounding Box Diffusion for Indoor Human Perception", IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) Workshop, October 2025.
  BibTeX TR2025-154 PDF Software
  - @inproceedings{Yataka2025oct,
  - author = {Yataka, Ryoma and Wang, Pu and Boufounos, Petros T. and Takahashi, Ryuhei},
  - title = {{Radar-Conditioned 3D Bounding Box Diffusion for Indoor Human Perception}},
  - booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) Workshop},
  - year = 2025,
  - month = oct,
  - url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-154}
  - }
- Karumanchi, S., Rokaha, B., Schperberg, A., Vinod, A.P., "Energy-constrained multi-robot exploration for autonomous map building", IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), DOI: 10.1109/IROS60139.2025.11247332, October 2025, pp. 9154-9161.
  BibTeX TR2025-131 PDF
  - @inproceedings{Karumanchi2025oct,
  - author = {Karumanchi, Sambhu and Rokaha, Bhagawan and Schperberg, Alexander and Vinod, Abraham P.},
  - title = {{Energy-constrained multi-robot exploration for autonomous map building}},
  - booktitle = {IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)},
  - year = 2025,
  - pages = {9154--9161},
  - month = oct,
  - doi = {10.1109/IROS60139.2025.11247332},
  - url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-131}
  - }
- Peng, K.-C., "Joint Training of Image Generator and Detector for Road Defect Detection", IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) Workshops, October 2025.
  BibTeX TR2025-149 PDF Video Presentation
  - @inproceedings{Peng2025oct,
  - author = {{{Peng, Kuan-Chuan}}},
  - title = {{{Joint Training of Image Generator and Detector for Road Defect Detection}}},
  - booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) Workshops},
  - year = 2025,
  - month = oct,
  - url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-149}
  - }
See All Publications for Computer Vision
Videos

[ICCV 2025] SAC-GNC: SAmple Consensus for adaptive Graduated Non-Convexity

[BMVC 2025] Towards Open-Vocabulary Multimodal 3D Object Detection with Attributes

[ICCV Workshop 2025] Joint Training of Image Generator and Detector for Road Defect Detection

[ICCV 2025] Toward Long-Tailed Online Anomaly Detection through Class-Agnostic Concepts

[CVPR 2025] TailedCore: Few-Shot Sampling for Unsupervised Long-Tail Noisy Anomaly Detection

[MERL Seminar Series Spring 2025] Amplifying human performance in combinatorial competitive programming

[MERL Seminar Series Spring 2025] Imaging Dynamic Scenes from Seconds to Picoseconds

[WACV 2025] Towards Zero-shot 3D Anomaly Localization

[NeurIPS 2024] Evaluating Large Vision-and-Language Models on Children's Mathematical Olympiads

[IROS 2024] Few-shot Transparent Instance Segmentation for Bin Picking

[ECCV 2024] PS-NEUS: A Probability-guided Sampler for Neural Implicit Surface Rendering

[ECCV 2024] Equivariant Spatio-Temporal Self-Supervision for LiDAR Object Detection

Gear-NeRF: Free-Viewpoint Rendering and Tracking with Motion-aware Spatio-Temporal Sampling

[MERL Seminar Series Fall 2023] Visual Programming - A compositional approach to building General Purpose Vision Systems

[MERL Seminar Series Fall 2023] The Confluence of Vision, Language, and Robotics

Are Deep Neural Networks SMARTer than Second Graders?

[CVPR 2023] EVAL: Explainable Video Anomaly Localization

[MERL Seminar Series Spring 2023] Pitfalls and Opportunities in Interpretable Machine Learning

Human Perspective Scene Understanding via Multimodal Sensing

[MERL Seminar Series Spring 2022] Self-Supervised Scene Representation Learning

[MERL Seminar Series Spring 2022] Learning Speech Representations with Multimodal Self-Supervision

HealthCam: A system for non-contact monitoring of vital signs

[MERL Seminar Series 2021] Learning to See by Moving: Self-supervising 3D scene representations for perception, control, and visual reasoning

[MERL Seminar Series 2021] Look and Listen: From Semantic to Spatial Audio-Visual Perception

Towards Human-Level Learning of Complex Physical Puzzles

Scene-Aware Interaction Technology

3D Object Discovery and Modeling Using Single RGB-D Images Containing Multiple Object Instances

Joint 3D Reconstruction of a Static Scene and Moving Objects

Direct Multichannel Tracking

FoldingNet: Interpretable Unsupervised Learning on 3D Point Clouds

FasTFit: A fast T-spline fitting algorithm

CASENet: Deep Category-Aware Semantic Edge Detection

Object Detection and Tracking in RGB-D SLAM via Hierarchical Feature Grouping

Pinpoint SLAM: A Hybrid of 2D and 3D Simultaneous Localization and Mapping for RGB-D Sensors

Action Detection Using A Deep Recurrent Neural Network

Semantic Scene Labeling

MERL Research on Autonomous Vehicles

3D Reconstruction

Saffron - Digital Type System

Obstacle Detection

Robot Bin Picking

Dose optimization for particle beam therapy

Sapphire - High Accuracy NC Milling Simulation

Deep Hierarchical Parsing for Semantic Segmentation

Global Local Face Upsampling Network

Gaussian Conditional Random Field Network for Semantic Segmentation

Fast Graspability Evaluation on Single Depth Maps for Bin Picking with General Grippers

Point-Plane SLAM for Hand-Held 3D Sensors

Tracking an RGB-D Camera Using Points and Planes

Fast Plane Extraction in Organized Point Clouds Using Agglomerative Hierarchical Clustering

Calibration of Non-Overlapping Cameras Using an External SLAM System

Voting-Based Pose Estimation for Robotic Assembly Using a 3D Sensor

Fast Object Localization and Pose Estimation in Heavy Clutter for Robotic Bin Picking

Learning to rank 3D features
Software & Data Downloads

Software & Data Downloads

MERL is making Computer Vision software and data available to the research community:

multi-view Radar object dEtection with 3D bounding boX diffusiOn (REXO)
MMHOI Dataset: Modeling Complex 3D Multi-Human Multi-Object Interactions (MMHOI)
Open Vocabulary Attribute Detection Dataset (OVAD)
Long-Tailed Online Anomaly Detection dataset (LTOAD)
Group Representation Networks (G-RepsNets)
Explainable Video Anomaly Localization (EVAL)

See All Downloads