Katsushi Ikeuchi
Katsushi Ikeuchi researches computer vision, robotics and learning from observation. He earned a University of Tokyo PhD in 1978 and worked on shape from shading in 1981. Later studies map human grasps to robot grasps and let a humanoid imitate dance. His cultural-heritage work includes the Great Buddha and Bayon digital archival projects. He received the PAMI Distinguished Researcher Award in 2011. He moved to Microsoft Research in 2015.
- Now at
- Microsoft Research
- Works
- 975
- Citations
- 19,654
- h-index
- 73
Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 14 October 2026.
Timeline
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1978–1981
Shape from visual information
Ikeuchi received his information engineering PhD at the University of Tokyo in 1978. He published 1981 work on recovering shape from shading and visible boundaries. This concerns extracting three-dimensional information from image evidence.
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1997–2007
Learning robot actions from people
He coauthored a 1997 study mapping observed human grasps to manipulator grasps. Later work includes a 2007 model enabling a biped humanoid to imitate dance. These studies put observation at the center of teaching a robot an action.
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2007–2008
Digitally recording cultural objects
He worked on the Great Buddha Project and laser range sensing for the Bayon archival project. These works apply visual reconstruction to cultural heritage. They preserve and analyze object and site geometry, alongside his work on robotics.
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2011–2015
Recognition and a career move
He received the 2011 PAMI Distinguished Researcher Award. He moved to Microsoft Research in 2015, after research at MIT, Japan’s Electrotechnical Laboratory, Carnegie Mellon and the University of Tokyo.
Sources and credits
Photo: www.cvl.iis.u-tokyo.ac.jp; creator not stated. License: Not stated by source. Source: cvl.iis.u-tokyo.ac.jp. Cropped to a square and resized. Ask us to remove or replace this photo.