Dr. Holger Caesar, Assistant Professor
Intelligent Vehicles Lab, TU Delft
Autonomous vehicles (AVs) have come a long way in the past two decades. Yet they are nowhere close to safely carrying our children to an arbitrary location. Until AVs become a net provider of safety, comfort and reduced carbon emissions, a lot of work remains to be done. The real world is full of challenging corner-cases and unexpected behavior. My research focuses on finding more scalable approaches to address these corner cases by collecting, mining, labeling, training from and evaluating sensor data more cleverly.
Latest news
10.2022: Yancong joins the group as postdoc
07.2022: One PhD position available
06.2022: Two keynotes at the 33rd IEEE Intelligent Vehicles (IV) Symposium at workshops on unsupervised learning and map-less driving. See you there!
05.2022: One paper published at the 2022 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
04.2022: Started as Assistant Professor at TU Delft
Team
PostDocs:
PhDs:
Ted de Vries-Lentsch (starting October)
Master students:
Jiarong Wei, "Active learning for semantic mapping"
Chinmay Polya Ramesh, "Enriching Diversity of Synthetic Images for Algorithm Development"
Xianzhong (Stan) Liu, "Offline tracking with object permanence"
Education & Vacancies
Guidelines
Only students from TU Delft are accepted for Master theses and internships
I do not supervise Bachelor theses
Please send me an email with your CV and any other relevant information if you are interested
Collaborations with industry partners are welcome
See the list of collaboration partners below
The primary supervisor needs to be in the company
Topics
Outperforming the state-of-the-art in
3d detection/tracking
Prediction/planning
Segmentation/mapping
Use of prior knowledge to solve these tasks
Lesser forms of supervision (self, weakly or semi supervised)
Active learning and partial labeling techniques to select which data to annotate
Domain adaptation and transfer learning
Sensor fusion
Collaborative perception
Semantic mapping
Internal Master Thesis Positions
Collaboration with Andras Palffy
"Pose estimation and reidentification with 3+1D radar"
"Creation of a 3d library of object models for autonomous driving"
External Master Thesis Positions
Delft Haptics Lab, TU Delft
Collaboration with Assistant Professor Arkady Zgonnikov
"Automated discovery of scenario-specific prediction metrics"
Computer Graphics and Visualization lab, TU Delft
Collaboration with Assistant Professor Michael Weinmann
"Pointcloud compression for autonomous driving data"
Biography
Dr. Holger Caesar is an Assistant Professor at the Intelligent Vehicles group of TU Delft in the Netherlands. The Intelligent Vehicles group is led by Prof. Dr. Dariu Gavrila and part of the Cognitive Robotics department. Holger's research interests are in the area of Autonomous Vehicle perception and prediction, with a particular focus on scalability of learning and annotation approaches. Previously Holger was a Principal Research Scientist at an autonomous vehicle company called Motional (formerly nuTonomy). There he started 3 teams with 20+ members that focused on Data Annotation, Autolabeling and Data Mining. Holger also developed the influential autonomous driving datasets nuScenes and nuPlan and contributed to the commonly used PointPillars baseline for 3d object detection from lidar data.
Holger received a PhD in Computer Vision from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland under Prof. Dr. Vittorio Ferrari and studied in Germany and Switzerland (KIT Karlsruhe, EPF Lausanne, ETH Zurich). In his spare time he likes to hike with his small family, as well as sing, run or cross the Alps by mountainbike.
Workshops & Events
[06/2022] 3rd workshop on Unsupervised Learning for Automated Driving
Keynote speaker "A farewell to human labeled datasets"
IV 2022
[06/2022] Workshop on Bridging the gap between map-based and map-less driving
Keynote speaker "Semantic mapping towards Level 5 autonomy"
IV 2022
[11/2021] Tech.AD USA
Highlighted speaker
Tech.AD 2021
[12/2020] Autonomy Talks
Invited speaker
ETH Zurich
[06/2021] AI Driving Olympics (AIDO) 6 Workshop
Workshop co-organizer, presented results of four nuScenes challenges
ICRA 2021
[12/2020] AI Driving Olympics (AIDO) 5 Workshop
Workshop co-organizer, presented nuScenes detection & lidarseg challenge results
NeurIPS 2020
[11/2020] Advanced Analytics, Beautifully Engineered in Singapore
Invited speaker
QuantumBlack, McKinsey
[10/2020] Workshop on Benchmarking Progress in Autonomous Driving
Workshop co-organizer, submitted position paper
IROS 2020
[12/2019] AI Driving Olympics (AIDO) 3 Workshop
Workshop co-organizer
NeurIPS 2019
[12/2019] Workshop on Autonomous Driving (WAD)
Challenge chair, presented nuScenes detection challenge results
CVPR 2019
[10/2019] COCO + Mapillary Joint Recognition Challenge Workshop
Workshop co-organizer, supported panoptic challenge
ICCV 2019
[05/2019] Advanced Robotics Centre
Invited seminar speaker
National University of Singapore (NUS), Singapore
[03/2019] Mobility Futures Seminar Series
Invited speaker at SMART Mobility Program
Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore
[10/2017] COCO + Places Joint Workshop
Workshop co-organizer, presented stuff challenge results
ICCV 2017
Publications
Panoptic nuScenes: A Large-Scale Benchmark for LiDAR Panoptic Segmentation and Tracking
Whye-Kit Fong, (...), Holger Caesar, (...) Abhinav Valada
ICRA 2022
nuPlan: A closed-loop ML-based planning benchmark for autonomous vehicles
Holger Caesar, Juraj Kabzan, Kok Seang Tan et al.
CVPR workshop 2021
The Efficacy of Neural Planning Metrics: A Meta-Analysis of PKL on nuScenes
Yiluan Guo, Holger Caesar, Oscar Beijbom et al.
IROS workshop 2021
nuScenes: A Multimodal Dataset for Autonomous Driving
Holger Caesar, Varun Bankiti, Alex H. Lang et al.
CVPR 2020
PointPillars: Fast Encoders for Object Detection from Point Clouds
Alex H Lang, Sourabh Vora, Holger Caesar et al.
CVPR 2019
COCO-Stuff: Thing and Stuff Classes in Context
Holger Caesar, Jasper Uijlings, Vittorio Ferrari
CVPR 2018
Weakly Supervised Object Localization Using Things and Stuff Transfer
Miaojing Shi, Holger Caesar, Vittorio Ferrari
ICCV 2017
Region-Based Semantic Segmentation with End-to-End Training
Holger Caesar, Jasper Uijlings, Vittorio Ferrari
ECCV 2016
Joint Calibration for Semantic Segmentation
Holger Caesar, Jasper Uijlings, Vittorio Ferrari
BMVC 2015
MediaParl: Bilingual Mixed Language Accented Speech Database
David Imseng; Hervé Bourlard; Holger Caesar et al.
SLT workshop 2012