Thomas Brox
Thomas Brox is a computer-vision researcher whose work spans optical flow, deep learning, and image understanding. He earned his computer-science doctorate at Saarland, worked in Bonn, Dresden, and Berkeley, and moved to Freiburg in 2010 to head its Computer Vision Group. His work includes U-Net for biomedical image segmentation and FlowNet for learned optical flow; an ERC Starting Grant funded his image-understanding project in 2011. The optical-flow work received the 2004 Longuet-Higgins Best Paper Award and the 2014 Koenderink Prize for Fundamental Contributions in Computer Vision. As of October 2026, he is an ELLIS Fellow at the University of Freiburg and a member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences.
- Now at
- University of Freiburg
- Works
- 386
- Citations
- 143,710
- h-index
- 92
Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 14 October 2026.
Timeline
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2004
Optical flow earns recognition
His optical-flow research earns the ECCV 2004 Longuet-Higgins Best Paper Award.
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2005
A computer science doctorate
He earns a Ph.D. in computer science from Saarland University.
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2005–2010
Research across three cities
After his doctorate, he works at the University of Bonn, the University of Dresden, and UC Berkeley.
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Since 2010
A Freiburg computer vision group
He moves to the University of Freiburg in 2010, where he heads the Computer Vision Group. He serves as program chair for ECCV 2020.
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2011
A grant for image understanding
He receives a €1.46 million ERC Starting Grant to develop a learning process that helps computers understand images automatically.
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2014
Recognition for optical flow
At ECCV 2014, he and Andrés Bruhn, Nils Papenberg, and Joachim Weickert receive the Koenderink Prize for Fundamental Contributions in Computer Vision.
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2015
Two networks for vision
With Olaf Ronneberger and Philipp Fischer, he coauthors U-Net, a deep network for biomedical image segmentation that uses data augmentation. He coauthors FlowNet, which frames optical-flow estimation as a supervised learning task for convolutional networks.
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As of October 2026
An ELLIS fellowship
He is an ELLIS Fellow at the University of Freiburg and a member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences.
Sources and credits
Photo: Jürgen Gocke, 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.
- Homepage of Thomas Brox
- 7.3 Million Euros for Freiburg Researchers
- Awards | Institute for Visualization and Interactive Systems | University of Stuttgart
- U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation
- FlowNet: Learning Optical Flow with Convolutional Networks
- Thomas Brox | European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems