Matthias Niessner
niessner.bsky.social
Matthias Niessner
@niessner.bsky.social
Professor for Visual Computing & Artificial Intelligence @TU Munich
Co-Founder @synthesiaIO
Co-Founder @SpAItialAI

https://niessnerlab.org/publications.html
📢📢 𝐏𝐞𝐫𝐜𝐇𝐞𝐚𝐝: 𝐏𝐞𝐫𝐜𝐞𝐩𝐭𝐮𝐚𝐥 𝐇𝐞𝐚𝐝 𝐌𝐨𝐝𝐞𝐥 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐒𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐥𝐞-𝐈𝐦𝐚𝐠𝐞 𝟑𝐃 𝐇𝐞𝐚𝐝 𝐑𝐞𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐮𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 & 𝐄𝐝𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠📢📢

PercHead reconstructs realistic 3D heads from a single image and enables disentangled 3D editing via geometric controls and style inputs from images or text.
November 5, 2025 at 11:37 AM
#ICCV last week was incredible — catching up with so many people, chatting about research, and, most importantly, having lots of fun.

Still hard to fathom this privilege as a researcher — getting to travel to such amazing places and be part of this brilliant community - Thanks!
October 29, 2025 at 12:25 PM
The hot topic at #ICCV2025 was World Models.

They come in different flavors — (interactive) video models, neural simulators, reconstruction models, etc. — but the overarching goal is clear: Generative AI that predict and simulate how the real world works.
October 26, 2025 at 3:59 PM
Hawaii on the same scale as the United Kingdom.
October 24, 2025 at 8:34 AM
𝐺𝑒𝑛𝑒𝑟𝑎𝑡𝑜 𝑒𝑟𝑔𝑜 𝑠𝑢𝑚 — I generate, therefore I am.
October 16, 2025 at 12:33 PM
Reposted by Matthias Niessner
for more documentation: github.com/scannetpp/sc...

Huge thanks to Yueh-Cheng Liu, as well as Chandan Yeshwanth and @niessner.bsky.social for their incredible work!
GitHub - scannetpp/scannetpp: [ICCV 2023 Oral] ScanNet++: A High-Fidelity Dataset of 3D Indoor Scenes
[ICCV 2023 Oral] ScanNet++: A High-Fidelity Dataset of 3D Indoor Scenes - scannetpp/scannetpp
github.com
October 13, 2025 at 4:19 PM
In the 'early days' of modern deep learning (2012-2015) when ConvNets such as AlexNet or VGG came out, it was considered almost impractical to train an ImageNet classifier from scratch.
October 12, 2025 at 3:46 PM
Fantastic retreat this weekend by our research groups!

Internal reviews, ideas brainstorming, paper reading, and much more! Of course also many social activities -- the highlight being our kayaking trip - lots of fun :)
September 28, 2025 at 9:12 AM
All six of our submissions were accepted to #NeurIPS2025 🎉🥳

Awesome works about Gaussian Splatting Primitives, Lighting Estimation, Texturing, and much more GenAI :)

Great work by Peter Kocsis, Yujin Chen, Zhening Huang, Jiapeng Tang, Nicolas von Lützow, Jonathan Schmidt 🔥🔥🔥
September 18, 2025 at 4:15 PM
Can we use video diffusion to generate 3D scenes?

𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐥𝐝𝐄𝐱𝐩𝐥𝐨𝐫𝐞𝐫 (#SIGGRAPHAsia25) creates fully-navigable scenes via autoregressive video generation.

Text input -> 3DGS scene output & interactive rendering!

🌍http://mschneider456.github.io/world-explorer/
📽️https://youtu.be/N6NJsNyiv6I
September 17, 2025 at 12:08 PM
ScaffoldAvatar: High-Fidelity Gaussian Avatars with Patch Expressions (#SIGGRAPH)

We reconstruct ultra-high fidelity photorealistic 3D avatars capable of generating realistic and high-quality animations including freckles and other fine facial details.

shivangi-aneja.github.io/projects/sca...
August 5, 2025 at 12:30 PM
📢 LiteReality: Graphics-Ready 3D Scene Reconstruction from RGB-D Scans🏠✨

-> converts RGB-D scans into compact, realistic, and interactive 3D scenes — featuring high-quality meshes, PBR materials, and articulated objects.

📷https://youtu.be/ecK9m3LXg2c
🌍https://litereality.github.io
July 4, 2025 at 7:52 AM
Seven papers accepted at #ICCV2025!

Exciting topics: lots of generative AI using transformers, diffusion, 3DGS, etc. focusing on image synthesis, geometry generation, avatars, and much more - check it out!

So proud of everyone involved - let's go🚀🚀🚀

niessnerlab.org/publications...
June 27, 2025 at 3:50 PM
Want to work on cutting-edge #AI?

We have several fully-funded 𝐏𝐡𝐃 & 𝐏𝐨𝐬𝐭𝐃𝐨𝐜 𝐨𝐩𝐞𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬 in our Visual Computing & AI Lab in Munich!

Apply here: application.vc.in.tum.de

Topics have a strong focus on Generative AI, 3DGs, NeRFs, Diffusion, LLMs, etc.
June 21, 2025 at 3:15 PM
#CVPR submissions per year have significantly increased.

Now over 11k / year with an expectation to grow even further. This comes with a lot of implications, how to handle the reviews, presentations, etc. Kudos to the organizers for all the efforts that went into it.
June 10, 2025 at 2:17 PM
Super excited to be in Nashville for #CVPR2025!

Looking forward to catching up with everyone -- feel free to reach out if you want to chat!

Everything is a Honky Tonk :)
June 10, 2025 at 2:12 AM
📢BecomingLit: Relightable Gaussian Avatars with Hybrid Neural Shading📢

We propose a hybrid neural shading scheme for creating intrinsically decomposed 3DGS head avatars, that allow real-time relighting and animation.

🌍https://lnkd.in/evNt8bV2
📷https://lnkd.in/ekB5QeEK
June 9, 2025 at 5:54 AM
📢Code Release of Pixel3DMM 📢
Looking for a robust and accurate face tracker?

We handle challenging in-the-wild settings, such as extreme lighting conditions, fast movements, and occlusions.

👨‍💻https://lnkd.in/e3dX23WV
🌍https://lnkd.in/eQ3Zpn3J

Pixel3DMM can be run on videos and single images.
June 5, 2025 at 4:54 PM
📢PBR-SR: Mesh PBR Texture Super Resolution from 2D Image Priors📢

We propose a new optimization to up-sample textures of 3D assets (albedo, roughness, metallic, and normal maps) by leveraging 2D super-resolution models.

📝http://arxiv.org/abs/2506.02846
📽️https://youtu.be/eaM5S3Mt1RM
June 4, 2025 at 2:09 PM
Reposted by Matthias Niessner
One of Europe’s top AI researchers raised a $13M seed to crack the ‘holy grail’ of models
One of Europe’s top AI researchers raised a $13M seed to crack the ‘holy grail’ of models | TechCrunch
One of Europe’s most prominent AI researchers, Matthias Niessner, is now the CEO of SpAItial, a startup working on spatial foundation models.
techcrunch.com
May 27, 2025 at 7:03 AM
🚀🚀🚀Announcing our $13M funding round to build the next generation of AI: 𝐒𝐩𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐚𝐥 𝐅𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐌𝐨𝐝𝐞𝐥𝐬 that can generate entire 3D environments anchored in space & time. 🚀🚀🚀

Interested? Join our world-class team:
🌍 spaitial.ai

youtu.be/FiGX82RUz8U
SpAItial AI: Building Spatial Foundation Models
YouTube video by SpAItial AI
youtu.be
May 27, 2025 at 9:26 AM
📢GeomHair: Reconstruction of Hair Strands from Colorless 3D Scans📢

We reconstruct hair strands from colorless 3D scans by extracting orientation cues directly from the mesh surface geometry by finding local characteristic lines and from shaded renderings using a neural 2D line detector.
May 9, 2025 at 11:40 AM
📢Pixel3DMM: Versatile Screen-Space Priors for Single-Image 3D Face Reconstruction📢

-> highly accurate face reconstruction by training powerful VITs via surface normals & UV-coordinates estimation.

These cues from our 2D foundation model constrain the 3DMM parameters, achieving great accuracy.
May 2, 2025 at 8:33 AM
📢 LinPrim: Linear Primitives for Differentiable Volumetric Rendering 📢

We use octahedra or tetrahedra as explicit as volumetric building blocks for gradient-based novel view synthesis - as an alternative to 3D Gaussians with discrete, bounded geometry.

🌍 nicolasvonluetzow.github.io/LinPrim/
April 25, 2025 at 6:39 PM
📢 SHeaP: Self-Supervised Head Predictor Learned via 2D Gaussians 📢

Given a single input image, we predict accurate 3D head geometry, pose, and expression.

🌍 nlml.github.io/sheap/
🎥 youtu.be/vhXsZJWCBMA/

Great work by Liam Schoneveld, Davide Davoli, Jiapeng Tang
April 17, 2025 at 10:02 AM