On April 28th, I had the opportunity to visit the Computer Vision and Multimodal Computing Department at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics which is headed by Prof. Bernt Schiele. During my visit I also had the opportunity to talk to Björn Andres, Mario Fritz and Andreas Bulling — among others. Aside from getting to know their latest research, I also had great conversations about research in general and PhD programs in specific.

Figure 1 (click to enlarge): Screenshots from the interactive qualitative and quantitative results that can be found here: Qualitative Results; Quantitative Results.

In my talk, I presented results from my bachelor thesis and my recent CVIU publication. In the former, I tried to improve superpixel algorithms using depth information. Afterwards, I worked on an extensive comparison of 28 different superpixel algorithms on 5 different datasets. The main contribution is a final ranking including clear recommendations which superpixel algorithms to use in practice. Interactive visualizations of the results can also be found here: Qualitative Results; Quantitative Results — as shown in Figure 1.

The presentation slides can be downloaded below:

The presentation includes GIF animations — they have been tested with Adobe Reader and Foxit Reader on Windows. In Chrome and Firefox, the animations might not work.

Personal Take-Away. As a master student I can only recommend to take any chance to visit other universities or departments. While I also discussed amazing research in different directions — including directions I did not know so far —, I benefited most from the informal discussions about career in general (in academia and industry).