Roberto Cipolla
Roberto Cipolla is a computer vision researcher whose career spans geometric reconstruction, deep image segmentation and embodied AI. He studied engineering at Cambridge and Pennsylvania, completed a computer vision PhD at Oxford, and joined Cambridge Engineering in 1992. His 2000 book with Peter Giblin explains how to recover three-dimensional surface shape from image sequences, while his coauthored SegNet model applies deep learning to pixel-wise segmentation. He founded an annual computer vision school and Toshiba’s Cambridge vision group, won the 2017 Mark Everingham Prize, and was elected an IAPR Fellow in 2020 and a Royal Society Fellow in 2022. As of October 2026, he is Professor of Information Engineering at Cambridge and an ICVSS director, with recent work on embodied AI.
- Now at
- University of Cambridge
- Works
- 509
- Citations
- 53,529
- h-index
- 82
Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 14 October 2026.
Timeline
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1984–2000
Degrees and a Cambridge professorship
He earns an engineering BA from Cambridge in 1984 and an electrical engineering MSE from Pennsylvania in 1985, then completes a computer vision PhD at Oxford in 1991. After a Toshiba Fellowship and engineering post in Japan in 1991–92, he joins Cambridge Engineering as a lecturer in 1992, becomes Reader in 1997 and Professor in 2000. With Peter Giblin, he publishes Visual Motion of Curves and Surfaces in 2000, a book on recovering 3D surface shape from image sequences of outlines.
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2006
An annual vision school
He founds the International Computer Vision Summer School in 2006, and it meets in Sicily every year.
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2006–2007
A Toshiba computer vision group
In 2006, he founds a computer vision group at Toshiba’s Cambridge Research Laboratory. Toshiba appoints him its lab director in 2007.
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2015
SegNet for image segmentation
He coauthors SegNet in 2015, a deep fully convolutional network for semantic pixel-wise segmentation.
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2017
The Mark Everingham Prize
He shares the 2017 Mark Everingham Prize with Sebastiano Battiato and Giovanni Maria Farinella for creating and organising ICVSS from 2007 to 2017.
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2020
An IAPR fellowship
IAPR elects him a Fellow in 2020 for contributions to geometric models in computer vision and scene understanding.
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2022
A Royal Society fellowship
The Royal Society elects him a Fellow in 2022 for his work in computer vision.
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As of October 2026
Professor and ICVSS director
As of October 2026, he is Professor of Information Engineering at Cambridge and one of the directors of ICVSS 2026. At a September 2026 lecture, he discusses self-supervision, vision-language models and embodied AI.
Sources and credits
Photo: Roberto Cipolla , via Wikimedia Commons. License: CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: commons.wikimedia.org. Cropped to a square and resized. Ask us to remove or replace this photo.
- Roberto Cipolla | Jesus College in the University of Cambridge
- Professor Roberto Cipolla elected a Fellow of The International Association for Pattern Recognition
- Visual Motion of Curves and Surfaces - Roberto Cipolla, Peter Giblin - Google Books
- SegNet: A Deep Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Architecture for Image Segmentation
- Award for information engineering academic
- Chronological List of IAPR Fellows
- Professor Roberto Cipolla elected a Fellow of the Royal Society
- ICVSS 2026 - International Computer Vision Summer School 2026
- MaLGa Lectio Magistralis - Roberto Cipolla