Bio

Tolga Birdal is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Geometric Computing group of Prof. Leonidas Guibas. He has recently defended his PhD thesis at the Computer Vision Group, Chair for Computer Aided Medical Procedures, Technical University of Munich and was a Doktorand at Siemens AG. He completed his Bachelors as an Electronics Engineer at the Sabanci University in 2008. In his subsequent postgraduate programme, he studied Computational Science and Engineering at Technical University of Munich. In continuation to his Master's thesis on “3D Deformable Surface Recovery Using RGBD Cameras”, he focused his research and development on large object detection, pose estimation and reconstruction using point clouds. Tolga is awarded both Ernst von Siemens Scholarship and EMVA Young Professional Award 2016 for his PhD work. He has several publications at the well respected venues such as NeurIPS, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, IROS, ICASSP and 3DV. Aside from his academic life, Tolga is a natural Entrepreneur. He has co-founded multiple companies including Befunky, a widely used web based image processing platform. For further information, visit tbirdal.me and http://campar.in.tum.de/Main/TolgaBirdal.

Honors & Awards

  • Best Paper Finalist, Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) (2019)
  • Young Professional Award, European Machine Vision Association (EMVA) (2016)
  • Ernst von Siemens Scholarship, Siemens AG (2014-2018)
  • IPAM Computer Vision Graduate Summer School Scholarship, National Science Foundation (NSF) (2013)
  • Best Student Paper Award, ICCV Workshop on Multiview Relationships in 3D Data (2017)
  • Alper Atalay Best Paper Award, IEEE Conference on Signal Processing and Communications Applications (SIU) (2013)
  • Merit Scholarship, Sabanci University (2004-2008)
  • Sait Halman Computer Honor Prize, Robert College (2004)

Professional Education

  • Doctor of Philosophy, Technische Universitat Munchen (2019)
  • Bachelor of Science, Sabanci University (2008)
  • Master of Science, Technische Universitat Munchen (2011)
  • PhD, Technical University of Munich, Informatics (Computer Science) (2018)

Stanford Advisors

Contact

  • Academic
    tbirdal@stanford.edu
    University - Scholar Department: Computer Science Position: Postdoctoral Scholar
    University - Other Teaching/Research Department: Computer Science Position: Lecturer

Additional Info

  • Mail Code: 9025

2020-21 Courses

All Publications

  • From Planes to Corners: Multi-Purpose Primitive Detection in Unorganized 3D Point Clouds RA-Letters Sommer, C., Sun, Y., Guibas, L. J., Cremers, D., Birdal, T. 2020; 5: 8

    View details for DOI 10.1109/LRA.2020.2969936

  • Explaining the Ambiguity of Object Detection and 6D Pose from Visual Data International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) Manhardt, F., Arroyo, D., Rupprecht, C., Busam, B., Birdal, T., Navab, N., Tombari, F. 2019
  • Probabilistic Permutation Synchronization using the Riemannian Structure of the Birkhoff Polytope Birdal, T., Simsekli, U., IEEE Comp Soc IEEE. 2019: 11097–108

    View details for DOI 10.1109/CVPR.2019.01136

    View details for Web of Science ID 000542649304073

  • Ppf-foldnet: Unsupervised learning of rotation invariant 3d local descriptors Proceedings of the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) Deng, H., Birdal, T., Ilic, S. 2018
  • A Minimalist Approach to Type-Agnostic Detection of Quadrics in Point Clouds Birdal, T., Busam, B., Navab, N., Ilic, S., Sturm, P., IEEE IEEE. 2018: 3530–40

    View details for DOI 10.1109/CVPR.2018.00372

    View details for Web of Science ID 000457843603070

  • Bayesian Pose Graph Optimization via Bingham Distributions and Tempered Geodesic MCMC Birdal, T., Simsekli, U., Eken, M., Ilic, S., Bengio, S., Wallach, H., Larochelle, H., Grauman, K., CesaBianchi, N., Garnett, R. NEURAL INFORMATION PROCESSING SYSTEMS (NIPS). 2018

    View details for Web of Science ID 000461823300029

  • Survey of Higher Order Rigid Body Motion Interpolation Methods for Keyframe Animation and Continuous-Time Trajectory Estimation Haarbach, A., Birdal, T., Ilic, S., IEEE IEEE. 2018: 381–89

    View details for DOI 10.1109/3DV.2018.00051

    View details for Web of Science ID 000449774200040

  • PPFNet: Global Context Aware Local Features for Robust 3D Point Matching Deng, H., Birdal, T., Ilie, S., IEEE IEEE. 2018: 195–205

    View details for DOI 10.1109/CVPR.2018.00028

    View details for Web of Science ID 000457843600021

  • Camera Pose Filtering with Local Regression Geodesics on the Riemannian Manifold of Dual Quaternions Busam, B., Birdal, T., Navab, N., IEEE IEEE. 2017: 2436–45

    View details for DOI 10.1109/ICCVW.2017.287

    View details for Web of Science ID 000425239602058

  • A Point Sampling Algorithm for 3D Matching of Irregular Geometries Birdal, T., Ilic, S., Bicchi, A., Okamura, A. IEEE. 2017: 6871–78

    View details for Web of Science ID 000426978206060

  • CAD Priors for Accurate and Flexible Instance Reconstruction Birdal, T., Ilic, S., IEEE IEEE. 2017: 133–42

    View details for DOI 10.1109/ICCV.2017.24

    View details for Web of Science ID 000425498400015

  • X-Tag: A Fiducial Tag for Flexible and Accurate Bundle Adjustment Birdal, T., Dobryden, I., Ilic, S., IEEE IEEE. 2016: 556–64

    View details for DOI 10.1109/3DV.2016.65

    View details for Web of Science ID 000391542200061

  • Online Inspection of 3D Parts via a Locally Overlapping Camera Network Birdal, T., Bala, E., Eren, T., Ilic, S., IEEE IEEE. 2016

    View details for Web of Science ID 000382670200084

  • Point Pair Features Based Object Detection and Pose Estimation Revisited Birdal, T., Ilic, S., Brown, M., Kosecka, J., Theobalt, C. IEEE. 2015: 527–35

    View details for DOI 10.1109/3DV.2015.65

    View details for Web of Science ID 000380389600060

  • A UNIFIED PROBABILISTIC FRAMEWORK FOR ROBUST DECODING OF LINEAR BARCODES Simsekli, U., Birdal, T., IEEE IEEE. 2015: 1946–50

    View details for Web of Science ID 000427402902011