Jean-Marc Odobez

Jean-Marc Odobez is a Senior Scientist at the IDIAP Research Institute and Adjunct Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), where he is affiliated with the School of Engineering and serves on the Electrical Engineering Doctoral committee (EDEE). He leads the Perception & Activity Understanding Group at Idiap and has extensive teaching responsibilities across multiple departments.

Dr. Odobez received his PhD in Computer Science from Rennes University in 1994. His research focuses on multimodal perception systems combining computer vision, statistical machine learning, and deep learning for activity recognition, behavior understanding, and human-robot interaction. His work spans diverse application domains including human health assessment, social robotics, and media content analysis.

His recent research shows strong trends in gaze estimation, human activity recognition, and multimodal processing. His team has developed innovative solutions for gaze tracking, head pose estimation, and activity recognition using depth sensors and neural networks. His work increasingly bridges computer vision with digital humanities, particularly in the analysis of ancient Maya glyphs.

• IEEE member
• Associate Editor of Machine Vision and Applications journal

Dr. Odobez has supervised numerous PhD students and serves as a committee member for the Electrical Engineering Doctoral program. He has been principal investigator for over 16 European and Swiss research projects and has worked on 10 technology transfer projects with SMEs. He co-founded Klewel SA and Eyeware SA, focusing on eye tracking and attention modeling technologies. His research group actively collaborates with industry partners and maintains strong connections with the computer vision and human-computer interaction research communities.