Otmar Hilliges
Otmar Hilliges works at the intersection of computer vision, machine learning and human-computer interaction. He earned his doctorate at LMU Munich in 2009 and researched at Microsoft Cambridge during 2010–2013. His ETH research includes gaze estimation, human motion models and perception for AI agents. He coauthored ETH-XGaze, a dataset and benchmark designed to test gaze estimation across large variations in head pose and eye direction.
- Now at
- ETH Zurich
- Works
- 261
- Citations
- 18,657
- h-index
- 60
Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 14 October 2026.
Timeline
-
2009
Doctoral training in computer science
Hilliges earned his doctorate in computer science at LMU Munich in 2009. He also earned a computer science Diplom from TU Munich. His later work connects visual perception and interaction.
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2010–2013
Interactive technologies at Microsoft
He worked as a postdoctoral researcher and later a researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge. He worked there from 2010 to 2013 in the Interactive 3D Technologies group.
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2020
A benchmark for gaze estimation
Hilliges coauthored ETH-XGaze with five collaborators. The dataset contains more than one million images from 110 participants, with varied gaze and extreme head poses. The paper defines a common evaluation protocol to make gaze-estimation comparisons more consistent.
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2022–2027
Human-centric perception for agents
His lab’s AI-Perceive ERC project runs from 2022 to 2027. The project focuses on robust human-centric computer vision for advanced AI agents. This connects perception of people with the wider aim of systems that can interact with them.
Sources and credits
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