Jan Koenderink
Jan Koenderink researches visual perception, geometry and image structure. His work connects mathematical models of images with psychophysics and computer vision. Koenderink joined Groningen’s psychology faculty in 1972 and moved to Utrecht physics and astronomy in the late 1970s. His chair concerned the physics of human perception. Koenderink’s work studies image structure at different levels of resolution. The 1984 Biological Cybernetics paper develops a family of derived images indexed by resolution, with a constraint against introducing spurious detail. He retired from the Utrecht physics and astronomy professorship in 2008. He later held visiting or fellowship roles.
- Now at
- Utrecht University and KU Leuven
- Works
- 747
- Citations
- 26,578
- h-index
- 72
Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 14 October 2026.
Timeline
-
1972
Psychology and visual research
Koenderink joined Groningen’s psychology faculty in 1972 and moved to Utrecht physics and astronomy in the late 1970s. His chair concerned the physics of human perception.
-
1984
The structure of images
Koenderink’s work studies image structure at different levels of resolution. The 1984 Biological Cybernetics paper develops a family of derived images indexed by resolution, with a constraint against introducing spurious detail.
-
2008
Utrecht retirement
He retired from the Utrecht physics and astronomy professorship in 2008. He later held visiting or fellowship roles.
-
2021
A scale-space retrospective
In a 2021 editorial, Koenderink identified The Structure of Images as the 1984 origin of a concept that became known as scale space. It is Koenderink’s own retrospective on that research.
Sources and credits
Photo: www.sg.uu.nl; creator not stated. License: Not stated by source. Source: sg.uu.nl. Cropped to a square and resized. Ask us to remove or replace this photo.