Research
My research concerns the development of intelligent machines, with the particular aim of “teaching” computers to (1) understand the behaviour and intent of human users, and (2) to correctly interpret (or “See”) objects and scenes depicted in colour/depth images or videos. I work and publish in the fields of Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Discrete Optimization, Game Theory and Human-Computer Interaction. I am currently working on (1) the use of online social networks such as Facebook for conducting behavioural game theory experiments, and (2) the development of robust systems for human pose estimation and gesture recognition, and scene understanding using new depth sensors such as XBox KINECT.
Recent Academic Duties (All Academic Duties)
- Editorial board member, International Journal for Computer Vision (IJCV)
- Workshop Chair, International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) 2013
- Area Chair, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2013
- Area Chair, British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC) 2012
- Area Chair, Indian Conference on Vision, Graphics and Image Processing (ICVGIP) 2012
- Reviewer for European Research Council, TPAMI, IJCV, JMLR, SIGGRAPH, NIPS, AISTATS, ICCV, ECCV, CVPR, BMVC, CVIU
- Organizer, CVPR 2011 Workshop on Inference in Graphical Models with Structured Potentials , CVPR, Colorado Springs (June 2011)
- Tutorial Chair, International Conference on Computer Vision , Barcelona (September 2011)
- Organizer, Machine Learning and Perception Seminar Series , MSR Cambridge (2009 - Present)
- Organizer, International Workshop on Tractability , Cambridge (June 2010)
Recent News (All Updates)
- April 2013, Papers on online algorithms for diverse recommendations and computation of coalition structures in coalition games are accepted to appear in AAAI 2013.
- March 2013, Four papers (two for oral presentation) accepted to appear in CVPR 2013.
- February 2013, Invited to join the editorial board of IJCV.
- January 2013, Paper on faster training of structural SVMs is accepted to appear in AISTATS 2012 ( video ).
- October 2012, PAMI paper describing the pose estimation system for KINECT has been accepted.
- September 2012, Two papers (1) structured output prediction with multiple choices (2) context driven random forests are accepted to appear in NIPS 2012.
- August 2012, The accepted ECCV and DAGM papers are now available online.
- July 2012, Jamie Shotton and I have written a new book chapter on our recent work on Human Pose Estimation for the KINECT.
- June 2012, Five papers (two for oral presentation) accepted to appear in the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV).
- May 2012, The MSR KINECT gesture dataset collected for our CHI 2012 paper is now available.
- April 2012, 3 Papers on Behavioural Game Theory and Personality-Online Behaviour patterns are accepted to appear in ACM WebSci 2012 .
- March 2012, Papers accepted to CHI 2012, AISTATS 2012, Eurographics 2012 and PAMI/IJCV are now available online.
- January 2012, Carsten Rother and I are teaching the Advanced Computer Vision course in the Engineering department of the University of Cambridge.
- October 2011, Our paper on simulataneous localization and 3D mapping wins the Best Paper Award at ISMAR 2011.
- October 2011, Interviews on the role of Behavioural game theory appear in Forbes and The Economic Times.
- September 2011, Our first Facebook app (MSR Project Waterloo) for conducting behavioural game theory experiments is now online!
- September 2011, The KinectFusion system has been made public. (Project Page) (video) (See UIST and ISMAR papers for detail)
- June 2011, Our book on Advances in Markov Random Fields for Vision and Image Processing has been published by MIT press.
- June 2011, 4 papers on adpative algorithms for MAP inference appear in AISTATS 2011, ICML 2011 and CVPR 2011.
- December 2011, Our paper on evaluation and learning of interactive Segmentation systems wins the Best Paper Award at ICVGIP 2010.
- October 2010, Our paper on inference with co-occurence potential wins the Best Paper Award at ECCV 2010.
Some Recent Projects
Recent Selected Publications (2009-2013) (All Publications)
Books and Edited Volumes
Scene Understanding (Object Detection, Segmentation, Recognition and Pose Estimation)
- Peter Kontschieder, Pushmeet Kohli, Jamie Shotton, Antonio Criminisi
GeoF: Geodesic Forests for Learning Coupled Predictors (Oral Presentation) In: CVPR 2013. [pdf coming soon]
- Roman Shapovalov, Dmitry Vetrov, Pushmeet Kohli
Spatial Inference Machines (Oral Presentation). In: CVPR 2013. [pdf coming soon]
- Nima Razavi, Jurgen Gall, Pushmeet Kohli, Luc Van Gool
Latent Hough Transforms for Object Detection. In: ECCV 2012. [pdf] (Oral Presentation)
- Nathan Silberman, Derek Hoiem, Pushmeet Kohli, Rob Fergus
Indoor Segmentation and Support Inference from RGBD Images. In: ECCV 2012. [pdf] (Oral Presentation)
- Stefan Holzer, Jamie Shotton, Pushmeet Kohli
Learning to Efficiently Detect Repeatable Interest Points in Depth Data. In: ECCV 2012. [pdf] 
- Tatiana Novikova, Olga Barinova, Pushmeet Kohli, Victor Lempitsky
Large-Lexicon Attribute-Consistent Text Recognition in Natural Images. In: ECCV 2012. [pdf] 
- Pushmeet Kohli, Jamie Shotton
Key Developments in Human Pose Estimation for Kinect. Book chapter 2012. [pdf] 
- Min Sun, Pushmeet Kohli, Jamie Shotton
Conditional Regression Forests for Human Pose Estimation. In: CVPR 2012 [pdf]

- Olga Barinova, Victor Lempitsky, Pushmeet Kohli
On Detection of Multiple Object Instances using Hough Transforms. In: PAMI 2012. [pdf] 
- Elena Tretyak, Olga Barinova, Pushmeet Kohli, Victor Lempitsky
Geometric Image Parsing in Man-Made Environments. In: IJCV 2012. [pdf] 
- Sebastian Nowozin, Carsten Rother, Shai Bagon, Toby Sharp, Bangpeng Yao, Pushmeet Kohli
Decision Tree Fields. In: ICCV 2011. [pdf]
- Ross Girshick, Jamie Shotton, Pushmeet Kohli, Antonio Criminisi, Andrew Fitzgibbon
Efficient Regression of General-Activity Human Poses from Depth Images. In: ICCV 2011. [pdf] 
- Lubor Ladicky, Chris Russell, Pushmeet Kohli, Philip Torr
Graph Cut based Inference with Co-occurrence Statistics. In: ECCV 2010. [pdf] [Appendix] (Oral Presentation) (Best Paper Award)
- Olga Barinova, Victor Lempitsky, Elena Tretiak, Pushmeet Kohli
Geometric Image Parsing in Man-Made Environments. In: ECCV 2010. [pdf]
- Olga Barinova, Victor Lempitsky, Pushmeet Kohli
On Detection of Multiple Object Instances using Hough Transforms. In: CVPR 2010 . [pdf] (Oral Presentation)
- Lubor Ladicky, Chris Russell, Pushmeet Kohli, Philip Torr
Associative Hierarchical CRFs for Object Class Image Segmentation. In: ICCV 2009. [pdf]
- Pushmeet Kohli, Lubor Ladicky, Philip Torr
Robust Higher Order Potentials for Enforcing Label Consistency. In: IJCV 2009. [pdf] [link]
- Pushmeet Kohli, Jonathan Rihan, Mathieu Bray, Philip Torr
Simultaneous Segmentation and Pose Estimation of Humans using Dynamic Graph Cuts. In: IJCV 2008. [pdf] [link]
Intelligent Interactive Systems
- Pushmeet Kohli, Hannes Nickish, Carsten Rother, Christoph Rhemann
User-centric Learning and Evaluation of Interactive Segmentation Systems. In: IJCV 2012. [pdf]
- Simon Fothergill, Helena Mentis, Pushmeet Kohli, Sebastian Nowozin
Instructing People for Training Gestural Interactive Systems. In: CHI 2012. [pdf]
- Hannes Nickish, Carsten Rother, Pushmeet Kohli, Christoph Rhemann.
Learning an Interactive Segmentation System. In: ICVGIP 2010. [pdf] [Appendix] (Oral Presentation) (Best Paper Award)
Augmented Reality and Image/Video Editing
- Michael W. Tao, Jiamin Bai, Pushmeet Kohli, Sylvain Paris
SimpleFlow: A Non-iterative, Sublinear Optical Flow Algorithm. In: Eurographics 2012. [pdf] [ Project Page ]
- Richard Newcombe, Shahram Izadi, Otmar Hilliges, David Molyneaux, David Kim, Andrew Davison, Pushmeet Kohli, Jamie Shotton, Steve Hodges, Andrew Fitzgibbon
KinectFusion: Real-time 3D Reconstruction and Interaction Using a Moving Depth Camera. In: ISMAR 2011. [pdf]
Best Paper Award)
- Shahram Izadi, David Kim, Otmar Hilliges, David Molyneaux, Richard Newcombe, Pushmeet Kohli, Jamie Shotton, Steve Hodges, Dustin Freeman, Andrew Davison, Andrew Fitzgibbon
KinectFusion: Real-time 3D Reconstruction and Interaction Using a Moving Depth Camera. In: UIST 2011. [pdf]
- Alexander Mansfield, Mukta Prasad, Carsten Rother, Toby Sharp, Pushmeet Kohli and Luc Van Gool
Transforming Image Completion. In: BMVC 2011. [pdf]
- Alex Rav-Acha, Pushmeet Kohli, Andrew Fitzgibbon, Carsten Rother
Unwrap Mosaics: A new representation for video editing. In: SIGGRAPH 2008.
[pdf]
[webpage]
[video]
[Press Coverage]
Random Fields, MAP Inference and Discrete Optimization
- Abner Guzmán-Rivera, Pushmeet Kohli, Dhruv Batra
Faster Training of Structural SVMs with Diverse M-Best Cutting-Planes (Oral Presentation) In: AISTATS 2013. [pdf coming soon]
- Christopher Zach, Pushmeet Kohli
A Convex Discrete-Continuous Approach for Markov Random Fields. In: ECCV 2012. [pdf] 
- Daniel Tarlow, Dhruv Batra, Pushmeet Kohli, Vladimir Kolmogorov
Dynamic Tree Block Coordinate Ascent In: ICML 2011. [pdf] 
- Patrick Pletscher, Sebastian Nowozin, Pushmeet Kohli, Carsten Rother
Putting MAP back on the map In: DAGM 2011. [pdf] 
- Taesup Kim, Sebastian Nowozin, Pushmeet Kohli, Chang Yoo
Variable Grouping for Energy Minimization In: CVPR 2011. [pdf] 
- Dhruv Batra, Pushmeet Kohli
Making the Right Moves: Guiding Alpha-Expansion using Local Primal-Dual Gaps. In: CVPR 2011. [pdf] 
- Dhruv Batra, Sebastian Nowozin, Pushmeet Kohli
Tighter Relaxations for MAP-MRF Inference: A Local Primal-Dual Gap based Separation Algorithm. In: AISTATS 2011. [pdf] 
- Pushmeet Kohli, Victor Lempitsky, Carsten Rother
Uncertainty Driven Multi-scale Optimization. (Oral Presentation) In: DAGM 2010. [pdf]
- Yongsub Lim, Kyomin Jung, Pushmeet Kohli
Energy Minimization Under Constraints on Label Counts. In: ECCV 2010. [pdf] [Tech Report]
- Karteek Alahari, Pushmeet Kohli, Philip Torr
Dynamic Hybrid Algorithms for MAP Inference in Discrete MRFs. In: PAMI 2010. [pdf]
- Kyomin Jung, Pushmeet Kohli, Devavrat Shah
Local Rules for Global MAP: When Do They Work? In: NIPS 2009. [pdf] [Tech Report]
Inference with Higher order Models and Constraints
- Pushmeet Kohli, Anton Osokin, Stefanie Jegelka
A Deep Random Field Model for Image Segmentation. In: CVPR 2013. [pdf coming soon]
- Patrick Pletscher, Pushmeet Kohli
Learning Low-order Models for Enforcing High-order Statistics. In: AISTATS 2012. [pdf] 
- Chris Russell, Lubor Ladicky, Pushmeet Kohli, Philip Torr
Exact and Approximate Inference in Associative Hierarchical Random Fields using Graph-Cuts. In: UAI 2010. [pdf]
- Pushmeet Kohli, M Pawan Kumar
Energy Minimization for Linear Envelope MRFs. In: CVPR 2010. [pdf]
- Carsten Rother, Pushmeet Kohli, Wei Feng, Jiaya Jia
Minimizing Sparse Higher Order Energy Functions of Discrete Variables. In: CVPR 2009. [pdf]
- Srikumar Ramalingam, Pushmeet Kohli, Karteek Alahari, Philip Torr
Exact Inference in Multi-label CRFs with Higher Order Cliques. In: CVPR 2008. [pdf]
Models for Low-level Vision (Segmentation, Stereo, and Optical Flow)
- Giuseppe Ottaviano, Pushmeet Kohli
Compressible Motion Fields. In: CVPR 2013. [pdf coming soon]
- Alexander Shekhovtsov, Pushmeet Kohli, Carsten Rother
Curvature Prior for MRF-Based Segmentation and Shape Inpainting. In: DAGM 2012. [pdf] (Oral Presentation)
- Sungwoong Kim, Sebastian Nowozin, Pushmeet Kohli, Chang Yoo
Higher-Order Correlation Clustering for Image Segmentation. In: NIPS 2011. [pdf] 
- Michael Bleyer, Carsten Rother, Pushmeet Kohli, Daniel Scharstein, Sudipta Sinha.
Object Stereo— Joint Stereo Matching and Object Segmentation. In: CVPR 2011. [pdf]
- Ben Glocker, Hauke Heibel, Nassir Navab, Pushmeet Kohli, Carsten Rother
TriangleFlow: Optical Flow with Triangulation-based Higher-Order Likelihoods. In: ECCV 2010. [pdf]
- Michael Bleyer, Carsten Rother, Pushmeet Kohli
Surface Stereo with Soft Segmentation. In: CVPR 2010. [pdf]
- Christoph Rhemann, Carsten Rother, Pushmeet Kohli, Margrit Gelautz
A Spatially Varying PSF-based Prior for Alpha Matting. In: CVPR 2010. [pdf]
- Victor Lempitsky, Pushmeet Kohli, Carsten Rother, Toby Sharp
Image Segmentation with a Bounding Box Prior. In: ICCV 2009. [pdf] [Tech Report] (Oral Presentation)
- Martin Szummer, Pushmeet Kohli, Derek Hoiem
Learning CRFs using Graph Cuts. In: ECCV 2008. [pdf]
Game Theory, Behavioral Economics and Information Retrieval
- Pushmeet Kohli, Yoram Bachrach, David Stillwell, Michael Kearns, Ralf Herbrich, Thore Graepel
Colonel Blotto On Facebook: The Effect of Social Relations On Strategic Interaction. In: ACM Web Sciences 2012. [pdf]
- Michal Kosinski, David Stillwell, Pushmeet Kohli, Yoram Bachrach, Thore Graepel
Personality and Website Choice. In: ACM Web Sciences 2012. [pdf]
- Yoram Bachrach, Michal Kosinski, Thore Graepel, Pushmeet Kohli, David Stillwell
Personality and Patterns of Facebook Usage. In: ACM Web Sciences 2012. [pdf]
- Michal Kosinski, Filip Radlinki, Pushmeet Kohli
Personality and Online Behavior of the Crowd. In: CIKM 2011.
- Yoram Bachrach, Pushmeet Kohli, Vladimir Kolmogorov
Team Coverage Games. In: AAMAS 2011 . [pdf]
- Yoram Bachrach, Pushmeet Kohli, Thore Graepel
Rip-off: Playing the Cooperative Negotiation Game. In: AAMAS 2011 . [pdf]
- Yoram Bachrach, Reshef Meir, Kyomin Jung, Pushmeet Kohli
Optimal Coalition Structures In Skill Games. (Oral Presentation) In: AAAI 2010 . [pdf]
PHD Dissertation