Jan-Michael Frahm

Also known as Jan‐Michael Frahm

Jan-Michael Frahm is a computer vision researcher whose work covers structure from motion, multi-view stereo and 3D reconstruction from photo collections. After a Ph.D. from Christian-Albrechts-University Kiel in 2005, he led a UNC Chapel Hill and ETH Zurich team that reconstructed Rome's landmarks from 3 million Internet photos in under a day in 2010. In 2016, he coauthored "Structure-From-Motion Revisited" with Johannes Schönberger, which released a full open-source reconstruction pipeline, and won the ISMAR Best Paper award with Akash Bapat and Enrique Dunn. He joined Meta as a research scientist manager in March 2019 and was one of 14 authors of the 2023 CVPR paper "A Practical Stereo Depth System for Smart Glasses." He is a research professor of computer science at UNC Chapel Hill.

Now at: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Badges: Bridge

Timeline

2005

A PhD at Kiel

He earns a Ph.D. from Christian-Albrechts-University Kiel in Germany in 2005.
2010

Building Rome on a Cloudless Day

In 2010, as a research assistant professor of computer science at UNC Chapel Hill, he leads a team with ETH Zurich that builds 3-D models of landmarks from Internet photos. The team uses 3 million images of Rome to reconstruct the city's major landmarks in less than 24 hours on a single PC, and presents the paper "Building Rome on a Cloudless Day" at the European Conference on Computer Vision, with Marc Pollefeys and Svetlana Lazebnik as collaborators.
2016

Structure-from-motion and COLMAP

With Johannes Schönberger, he coauthors "Structure-From-Motion Revisited" at CVPR in 2016, which proposes a new structure-from-motion technique and releases the full reconstruction pipeline as open source. COLMAP, a general-purpose structure-from-motion and multi-view stereo pipeline that asks users to cite the paper, was originally written by Schönberger with funding from his PhD advisors Frahm and Marc Pollefeys.
2016

ISMAR 2016 best paper

He, Akash Bapat and Enrique Dunn win the Best Paper award at ISMAR 2016. At the time, he is an associate professor at UNC and head of its 3D Computer Vision Group.
2018

NSF funding for AR glasses

In 2018, the National Science Foundation announces funding for a UNC team of Henry Fuchs, Frahm, Mohit Bansal, Prudence Plummer and Felicia Williams. Their project enhances human capabilities with virtual personal assistants in self-contained eyeglasses-based augmented reality systems.
March 2019

Research scientist manager at Meta

In March 2019, he joins Meta in Seattle as a research scientist manager.
2023

Depth sensing for smart glasses

He is one of 14 authors of "A Practical Stereo Depth System for Smart Glasses," accepted at CVPR 2023. The system estimates stereo depth with a fallback to monocular depth estimation, feeds a novel view generation pipeline for 3D photo effects, and runs in under one second on the CPU of a six-year-old Samsung Galaxy S8 phone.
As of October 2026

Research professor at UNC

He is a research professor of computer science at UNC Chapel Hill, with research interests that include structure from motion, multi-view stereo, robust estimation and markerless augmented reality.