Prof. Luc Van Gool

Research area: Computer Vision
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Prof. Luc Van Gool’s focus research areas are machine learning and computer vision. He is head of the Computer Vision Laboratory at ETH Zurich, while also leading the Computer Vision Research Group at KU Leuven, Belgium. Professor Van Gool is one of the world’s most cited scientists in computer science, particularly in computer vision and machine learning, with over 160,000 citations.

With his research teams, Luc Van Gool is a partner in several national and international projects, e.g. the EU ACTS project Vanguard, the EU Esprit projects Improofs and Impact, and the EU Brite-Euram project Soquetec. He is also involved in several other projects that range from fundamental research to application-driven developments. His major research interests include 2D and 3D object recognition, texture analysis, range acquisition, stereo vision, robot vision, and optical flow.

Prof. Van Gool’s research has been recognized with many prestigious awards, including the David Marr Prize, the Koenderink Award, the Helava Prize, the Tsuji Award and an ERC Advanced Grant. Further, he has co-founded 12 start-up companies (assaia, Endosat, eSaturnus, Eyetronics, Fashwell, GeoAutomation, kooaba, Parquery, Procedural, segments.ai, Sensifai, upicto). Technology giants such as Nvidia, Apple, and Facebook have opened offices in Zurich as a result of these and other successful ETH start ups.

2026

Carmelo Scribano, Mohammad Mahdi, Nedyalko Prisadnikov, Yuqian Fu, Giorgia Franchini, Danda Pani Paudel, Marko Bertogna, Luc Van Gool
Accelerating Vision Foundation Models with Drop-in Depthwise Convolution
In: International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR 2026)

Chenghao Qian, Nedko Savov, Lingdong Kong, Yeying Jin, Rui Song, Wenjing Li, Zhun Zhong, Jiaqi Ma, Gustav Markkula, Luc Van GoolSemantic-Aware, Physics-Informed, Geometry-Grounded Weather SynthesisIn: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV 2026)

Saman Motamed, William Harvey, Benjamin Klein, Luc Van Gool, Zhuoning Yuan, Ta-Ying ChengVOID: Video Object and Interaction DeletionIn: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV 2026)

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Mohammad Mahdi, Nedko Savov, Danda Pani Paudel, Luc Van GoolFrom Synchrony to Sequence: Exo-to-Ego Generation via InterpolationIn: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV 2026)

Yebin Yang, Di Wen, Lei Qi, Weitong Kong, Junwei Zheng, Ruiping Liu, Yufan Chen, Chengzhi Wu, Kailun Yang, Yuqian Fu, Danda Pani Paudel, Luc Van Gool, Kunyu Peng InterEdit: Navigating Text-Guided Multi-Human 3D Motion EditingIn: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV 2026)

Nedyalko Prisadnikov, Danda Pani Paudel, Yuqian Fu, Luc Van Gool
SOVA: Image size agnostic and task driven vision encoder
In: Forty-Third International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2026)

Zihao Dongfang, Xu Zheng, Ziqiao Weng, Yuanhuiyi Lyu, Danda Pani Paudel, Luc Van Gool, Kailun Yang, Xuming Hu
Are Multimodal Large Language Models Ready for Omnidirectional Spatial Reasoning?
In: The Findings track of IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026 (CVPR 2026 Findings)

Ahmet Berke Gokmen, Ajad Chhatkuli, Luc Van Gool, Danda Pani Paudel
Inferring Compositional 4D Scenes without Ever Seeing One
In: The IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2026)

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Nikolay Nikolov, Giuliano Albanese, Sombit Dey, Aleksandar Yanev, Luc Van Gool, Jan-Nico Zaech, Danda Pani Paudel
SPEAR-1: Scaling Beyond Robot Demonstrations via 3D Understanding
In: The IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2026)

Jiancheng Pan, Runze Wang, Tianwen Qian, Mohammad Mahdi, Yanwei Fu, Xiangyang Xue, Xiaomeng Huang, Luc Van Gool, Danda Pani Paudel, Yuqian Fu
V^{2}-SAM: Marrying SAM2 with Multi-Prompt Experts for Cross-View Object Correspondence
In: The IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2026)

Xiaolong Qian, Qi Jiang, Yao Gao, Lei Sun, Zhonghua Yi, Kailun Yang, Luc Van Gool, Kaiwei Wang
Towards Universal Computational Aberration Correction in Photographic Cameras: A Comprehensive Benchmark Analysis
In: The IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2026)

Mario Markov, Stefan Maria Ailuro, Luc Van Gool, Konrad Schindler, Danda Pani Paudel
FireScope: Wildfire Risk Raster Prediction With a Chain-of-Thought Oracle
In: The IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2026)

Yue Li, Qi Ma, Runyi Yang, Mengjiao Ma, Bin Ren, Nikola Popovic, Nicu Sebe, Theo Gevers, Luc Van Gool, Danda Pani Paudel, Martin R. Oswald
Chorus: Multi-Teacher Pretraining for Holistic 3D Gaussian Scene Encoding
In: The IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2026)

Bin Ren, Yawei Li, Xu Zheng, Yuqian Fu, Danda Pani Paudel, Hong Liu, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Luc Van Gool, Nicu Sebe
Efficient Degradation-agnostic Image Restoration via Channel-Wise Functional Decomposition and Manifold Regularization
In: The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2026)

Bin Ren, Runyi Yang, Qi Ma, Xu Zheng, Mengyuan Liu, Danda Pani Paudel, Luc Van Gool, Rita Cucchiara, Nicu Sebe
Rethinking Expressivity and Degradation-Awareness in Attention for All-in-One Blind Image Restoration
In: The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2026)

Ruilin Yao, Bo Zhang, Jirui Huang, Xinwei Long, Yifang Zhang, Tianyu Zou, Yufei Wu, Shichao Su, Yifan Xu, Wenxi Zeng, Zhaoyu Yang, Guoyou Li, Shilan Zhang, Zichan Li, Yaxiong Chen, Shengwu Xiong, Peng Xu, Jiajun Zhang, Bowen Zhou, David Clifton, Luc Van Gool
LENS: Multi-level Evaluation of Multimodal Reasoning with Large Language Models
In: The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2026)

Deheng Zhang, Yuqian Fu, Runyi Yang, Yang Miao, Tianwen Qian, Xu Zheng, Guolei Sun, Ajad Chhatkuli, Xuanjing Huang, Yu-Gang Jiang, Luc Van Gool, Danda Pani Paudel
EgoNight: Towards Egocentric Vision Understanding at Night with a Challenging Benchmark
In: The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2026)

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Asen Nachkov, Jan-Nico Zaech, Danda Pani Paudel, Xi Wang, Luc Van Gool
Autonomous Vehicle Path Planning by Searching With Differentiable Simulation
In: The 40th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2026)

Asen Nachkov, Danda Pani Paudel, Jan-Nico Zaech, Davide Scaramuzza, Luc Van Gool
Unlocking Efficient Vehicle Dynamics Modeling via Analytic World Models
In: The 40th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2026)