PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Ram Prabhakar

Also known as Ram Prabhakar Kathirvel

Ram Prabhakar is a computer vision researcher whose work on exposure fusion, HDR imaging and few-shot learning now reaches video foundation models. He did his PhD at the Indian Institute of Science from 2014 to 2021, presenting DeepFuse at ICCV in 2017 and few-shot HDR deghosting at CVPR in 2021. His BMVC 2021 paper on low-light RAW image enhancement was runner-up for Best Student Paper. As an Assistant Research Scientist at Johns Hopkins University, working with Rama Chellappa, he coauthored the gait-recognition paper that won the 2024 IAPR Best Biometrics Student Paper Award. Since September 2026, he is an Assistant Professor in the Wadhwani School of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at IIT Madras.

Timeline

  1. 2014–2021

    A PhD at IISc

    His doctoral studies at the Indian Institute of Science run from August 2014 to October 2021. He works in the Vision and AI Lab of the Department of Computational and Data Sciences under R. Venkatesh Babu.

  2. 2017

    DeepFuse exposure fusion

    He coauthors DeepFuse with V Sai Srikar and R. Venkatesh Babu at ICCV 2017. DeepFuse is an unsupervised deep learning approach for fusing extreme-exposure image pairs. It trains with a no-reference quality metric as its loss function, which removes the need for ground-truth images.

  3. 2021

    Few-shot HDR deghosting

    At CVPR 2021, he coauthors "Labeled From Unlabeled" with Gowtham Senthil, Susmit Agrawal, R. Venkatesh Babu and Rama Krishna Sai S Gorthi. The paper introduces zero and few-shot learning strategies for data-efficient HDR deghosting.

  4. 2021

    BMVC runner-up for low-light RAW

    His BMVC 2021 oral paper on few-shot domain adaptation for low-light RAW image enhancement, written with Vishal Vinod, Nihar Ranjan Sahoo and R. Venkatesh Babu, is runner-up for the Best Student Paper Award. Ten or fewer labeled samples from the target camera give similar or better enhancement than training on a large labeled dataset, and the paper adds a new low-light raw dataset captured with a Nikon camera.

  5. By 2024

    Assistant Research Scientist at Johns Hopkins

    He works with Rama Chellappa as an Assistant Research Scientist at Johns Hopkins University. In 2024, the group has four papers accepted at IJCB, and he coauthors three of them, on gait recognition, bias mitigation with diffusion-generated data, and a video-based multitask network.

  6. 2024

    IAPR biometrics student paper award

    He coauthors the IJCB 2024 paper "Distillation-guided Representation Learning for Unconstrained Gait Recognition" with Yuxiang Guo, Siyuan Huang, Chun Pong Lau, Rama Chellappa and Cheng Peng, and it wins the 2024 IAPR Best Biometrics Student Paper Award.

  7. Since September 2026

    Assistant Professor at IIT Madras

    In September 2026, he joins IIT Madras as Assistant Professor in the Wadhwani School of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. His research group, the Artificial Perception X (APX) Lab, works on computer vision and deep learning, with interests in video foundation models and trustworthy video generation.

Career

  1. Since 2026IIT MadrasAssistant Professor
  2. Johns Hopkins UniversityAssistant Research Scientist

Education

  1. 2021Indian Institute of SciencePhD

From the biography.

  1. The United States employs an estimated 48% of people shaping AIIncludes IIT Madras. We estimate where the people shaping AI work today, how universities, companies and research institutes split across countries, and how country shares have changed since the 1960s.
  2. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes IIT Madras. We estimate where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led. Massachusetts Institute of Technology leads with 467 former students, including 291 recorded doctorates.
  3. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974Includes IIT Madras. We estimate where the people shaping AI worked when their most-cited papers appeared: the company share was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974, and Google led all organizations in 2020–2024.
  4. Google has the highest combined h-index among AI organizationsIncludes IIT Madras. We estimate that Google holds the highest combined h-index at 8,016, while universities account for 73% of the deduplicated total across AI organizations.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Ram Prabhakar yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Vision and AI Lab val.cds.iisc.ac.in. Checked 22 October 2026.
  2. Ram Prabhakar | Wadhwani School of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence wsai.iitm.ac.in. Checked 22 October 2026.
  3. ICCV 2017 Open Access Repository openaccess.thecvf.com. Checked 22 October 2026.
  4. CVPR 2021 Open Access Repository openaccess.thecvf.com. Checked 22 October 2026.
  5. Few-Shot Domain Adaptation for Low Light RAW Image Enhancement val.cds.iisc.ac.in. Checked 22 October 2026.
  6. Four papers accepted at IJCB 2024 – AIEM aiem.jhu.edu. Checked 22 October 2026.
  7. IJCB 2024 Award Winners – IEEE IJCB 2024 ijcb2024.ieee-biometrics.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  8. Ram Prabhakar kramprabhakar.github.io. Checked 22 October 2026.