Computer Vision

Since March 2020, I have been working at the Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour. Biologists, psychologists, computer scientists and many more disciplines interdisciplinary work together and study collective behaviour across a wide range of species and across scales of organization.

I am a computer scientist within the Computer Vision and Image Analysis group. We focus on multi-object tracking and pose estimation methods for animals. We acquire data in our imaging facilities – the Imaging Barn and the Imaging Hangar – which are located in Möggingen at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and in the Centre for Visual Computing of Collectives at the University of Konstanz respectively.

Contact

E-mail: urs.waldmann@uni-konstanz.de
Github: urs-waldmann
Bluesky: @ursnwaldmann.bsky.social
X: @ursNwaldmann

News

I will be joining the Computer Vision Lab at Linköping University in August 2025.

2025/04/28 – Two papers (one oral, one poster) accepted at the CVPR 2025 CV4Animals workshop.
2025/01/29 – Received a Connected Minds Travel Grant for a two-month research stay at York University, Canada.
2024/12/20 – We are organizing the 5th CV4Animals workshop at CVPR 2025.
2024/11/29 – Received the Ontario Baden-Württemberg Scholarship for a two-month research stay at York University, Canada.
2024/11/20 – Successfully defended my PhD thesis titled Multi-Object Tracking and Pose Estimation for Animals.
2024/07/04 – uni’kon features our latest work „3D-MuPPET“ in #79 Freiheit, pp. 24-27. [German]

2024/05/27 – Press release about our latest work „3D-MuPPET“. [English, German]
2024/03/28 – 3D-MuPPET accepted for publication in the International Journal of Computer Vision. [paper]
2024/01/18 – We are organizing the 4th CV4Animals workshop at CVPR 2024.
News Archive

Journal Papers

Urs Waldmann*, Alex Chan*, Hemal Naik, Máté Nagy, Iain D. Couzin, Oliver Deussen, Bastian Goldluecke, and Fumihiro Kano: 3D-MuPPET: 3D Multi-Pigeon Pose Estimation and Tracking. International Journal of Computer Vision, 2024. (* Authors contributed equally.) [project page, press release]

Conference Papers

Urs Waldmann, Ole Johannsen, and Bastian Goldluecke: Neural Texture Puppeteer: A Framework for Neural Geometry and Texture Rendering of Articulated Shapes, Enabling Re-Identification at Interactive Speed. In Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV) Workshops, 2024 (oral presentation). [arXiv, code, video]

Simon Giebenhain*, Urs Waldmann*, Ole Johannsen, and Bastian Goldluecke: Neural Puppeteer: Keypoint-Based Neural Rendering of Dynamic Shapes. In Asian Conference on Computer Vision (ACCV), 2022. (* Authors contributed equally.) [project page, press release]

Urs Waldmann, Hemal Naik, Nagy Máté, Fumihiro Kano, Iain D. Couzin, Oliver Deussen, and Bastian Goldlücke: I-MuPPET: Interactive Multi-Pigeon Pose Estimation and Tracking. In Pattern Recognition (Proc. of DAGM GCPR), 2022 (oral presentation). [project page]

Urs Waldmann, Jannik Bamberger, Ole Johannsen, Oliver Deussen, and Bastian Goldlücke: Improving Unsupervised Label Propagation for Pose Tracking and Video Object Segmentation. In Pattern Recognition (Proc. of DAGM GCPR), 2022. [project page]

Peer-Reviewed Workshops

Valentin Schmucker, Alex Chan, Bastian Goldlücke, and Urs Waldmann: Towards texture- and shape-independent 3d keypoint estimation in birds. Accepted in track 1 (unpublished work) in CVPRW „CV4Animals“, 2025 (oral presentation). [workshop page]

Alex Hoi Hang Chan*, Otto Brookes*, Urs Waldmann, Hemal Naik, Iain D. Couzin, Majid Mirmehdi, Noël Adiko Houa, Emmanuelle Normand, Christophe Boesch, Lukas Boesch, Mimi Arandjelovic, Hjalmar Kühl, Tilo Burghardt †, and Fumihiro Kano †: Towards application-specific evaluation of vision models: Case studies in ecology and biology. Accepted in track 1 (unpublished work) in CVPRW „CV4Animals“, 2025. (*,† Authors contributed equally.) [workshop page, arXiv]

Urs Waldmann*, Alex Chan*, Hemal Naik, Máté Nagy, Iain D. Couzin, Oliver Deussen, Bastian Goldluecke, and Fumihiro Kano: 3D-MuPPET: 3D Multi-Pigeon Pose Estimation and Tracking. Accepted in track 1 (unpublished work) in CVPRW „CV4Animals“, 2023. (* Authors contributed equally.) [workshop page]

Urs Waldmann, Hemal Naik, Nagy Máté, Fumihiro Kano, Iain D. Couzin, Oliver Deussen, and Bastian Goldlücke: I-MuPPET: Interactive Multi-Pigeon Pose Estimation and Tracking. Accepted in track 2 (published work) in CVPRW „CV4Animals“, 2023. [workshop page]

Urs Waldmann, Jannik Bamberger, Ole Johannsen, Oliver Deussen, and Bastian Goldlücke: Improving Unsupervised Label Propagation for Pose Tracking and Video Object Segmentation. Accepted in track 2 (published work) in CVPRW „CV4Animals“, 2023. [workshop page]