Curriculum Vitae, Publications (June 2024): 

CV_Tom.pdf
Publications_list.pdf

I am currently serving as a post-doctoral researcher at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Water and Ecosystems Group, advisor: Cedric H David). Prior to this, I held a joint post-doctoral position at the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (Remote Sensing Group, advisor: Daniel Odermatt) and the University of Zurich (EClim Research Group on Environment and Climate, advisor: Holger Frey).

My academic journey includes the successful completion of a master's degree from RWTH Aachen University (Germany). Subsequently, I earned Ph.D. from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zürich (ETH Zürich, Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing Group). During my PhD, I had the privilege of working under the guidance of Konrad Schindler and Emmanuel Baltsavias.

Now is an exciting time to work at the crossroads of AI and Earth Observation, thanks to AI's remarkable progress and the wealth of satellite data available in recent decades. My primary area of research revolves around Geospatial Computer Vision with a focus on Machine Learning for Remote Sensing of Freshwater. At present, I work on Remote Sensing (SWOT) and Modelling of Earth's Surface Water. Furthermore, I explore the potential applications of Deep Learning in the context of mapping glacial lakes and monitoring lake ice. In the past, my research has encompassed a range of mid- and high-level computer vision challenges, including tasks such as Semantic Segmentation, Action Recognition, Visual Localization, and Scene Understanding.

I have been fortunate to contribute to research efforts within the Computer Vision and Remote Sensing research groups at various esteemed institutions, including ETH Zurich (Switzerland), Indian Institute of Science, Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, University of Zurich (Switzerland), Fraunhofer FKIE (Germany) and the RWTH Aachen University (Germany).

With over seven years of experience, I have actively contributed to research projects supported by organizations, including UNESCO (Adaptation Fund), the European Space Agency, GCOS Switzerland, the Swiss Federal Office of Environment, and DRDO (India).

News

PhD thesis 

Lake Ice Monitoring from Space and Earth with Machine Learning
Manu Tom
Doctoral Thesis, ETH Zürich, 2021

Publications (full-paper, peer-reviewed)

Pixel-based mapping of open field and protected agriculture using constrained Sentinel-2 data
Daniele la Cecilia, Manu Tom, Christian Stamm and Daniel Odermatt
ISPRS Open Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (Elsevier), volume 8, 100033, 2023, doi: 10.1016/j.ophoto.2023.100033


Learning a Joint Embedding of Multiple Satellite Sensors: A Case Study for Lake Ice Monitoring
Manu Tom, Yuchang Jiang, Emmanuel Baltsavias and Konrad Schindler
Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing (IEEE), volume 60, pages 1-15, 2022, Art no. 4306315, doi: 10.1109/TGRS.2022.3211184


Recent Ice Trends in Swiss Mountain Lakes: 20-year Analysis of MODIS Imagery
Manu Tom, Tianyu Wu, Emmanuel Baltsavias and Konrad Schindler
PFG – Journal of Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Geoinformation Science (Springer), volume 90, pages 413–431, 2022

Ice Monitoring in Swiss Lakes from Optical Satellites and Webcams using Machine Learning
Manu Tom, Rajanie Prabha, Tianyu Wu, Emmanuel Baltsavias, Laura Leal-Taixe and Konrad Schindler
MDPI Journal on Remote Sensing, volume 12, issue 21, 3555, 2020

Lake Ice Detection from Sentinel-​1 SAR with Deep Learning
Manu Tom*, Roberto Aguilar*, Pascal Imhof, Silvan Leinss, Emmanuel Baltsavias and Konrad Schindler (* equal contribution)
ISPRS Annals of Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, V-3-2020, 409–416, 2020
(ISPRS Congress, Nice, France, August 2020)
 [Code | Pre-Trained Model]

Lake Ice Monitoring with Webcams and Crowd-​Sourced Images
Rajanie Prabha, Manu Tom, Mathias Rothermel, Emmanuel Baltsavias, Laura Leal-Taixe and Konrad Schindler
ISPRS Annals of Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences,  V-2-2020, 549–556, 2020
(ISPRS Congress, Nice, France, August 2020)
 [Code | Photi-LakeIce Dataset | Pre-Trained Model]

Lake Ice Monitoring with Webcams
Muyan Xiao, Mathias Rothermel, Manu Tom, Silvano Galliani, Emmanuel Baltsavias, and Konrad Schindler
ISPRS Annals of Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, IV-2, 311-317, 2018
(ISPRS Technical Commission II Symposium, Riva del Garda, Italy, June 2018)
 [Code]

Lake Ice Detection in Low-Resolution Optical Satellite Images
Manu Tom, Ursula Kälin, Melanie Sütterlin, Emmanuel Baltsavias and Konrad Schindler
ISPRS Annals of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, volume IV-2, pages 279-286, 2018
(ISPRS Technical Commission II Symposium, Riva del Garda, Italy, June 2018)

3D Semantic Segmentation of Modular Furniture using rjMCMC
Ishrat Badami*, Manu Tom*, Markus Mathias and Bastian Leibe (*equal contribution)
IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV) 2017 (Santa Rosa, California, USA, March 2017)
 [Project page | Code | Dataset]

A Survey on Compressed Domain Video Analysis Techniques
R. Venkatesh Babu, Manu Tom and Paras Wadekar
Multimedia Tools and Applications, volume 75, issue 2, pages 1043-1078, 2016

Compressed Domain Human Action Recognition in H.264/AVC Video Streams
Manu Tom, R. Venkatesh Babu and R. Gnana Praveen
Multimedia Tools and Applications, volume 74, issue 21, pages 9323-9338, 2015

Human action recognition in H.264/AVC compressed domain using meta-cognitive radial basis function network
R. Venkatesh Babu, Badrinarayanan Rangarajan, Suresh Sundaram, and Manu Tom
Applied Soft Computing, volume 36, issue 21, pages 218-227, 2015

Automated Detection of Schlemm's Canal in Spectral-Domain Optical Coherence Tomography
Manu Tom, Vignesh Ramakrishnan, Christian van Oterendorp and  Thomas Deserno
Proceedings of SPIE 9414, Medical Imaging 2015: Computer-Aided Diagnosis, 941430 (Orlando, Florida, USA, February 2015)

Fast Moving-object Detection in H.264/AVC Compressed Domain for Video Surveillance
Manu Tom and R. Venkatesh Babu
IEEE National Conference on Computer Vision, Pattern Recognition, Image Processing and Graphics (Jodhpur, India, December 2013)

Projects

Reducing vulnerabilities of populations in the Central Asia region from glacier lake outburst floods in a changing climate

Funded by: UNESCO
Period: 2021-present
Website

Glacier Science in the Alps (AlpGlacier)

Funded by: European Space Agency (ESA)
Period: 2021-present
Website

Glacial Lake Formation due to Climate Change in Switzerland

Funded by: Swiss Federal Office of Environment, Swiss GCOS Office
Period: 2021-present
Website

Integrated Lake Ice Monitoring and Generation of Sustainable, Reliable, Long Time-Series

Funded by: Meteoswiss (GCOS Switzerland)
Period: 2018-2020
Website | Final Report

Integrated Monitoring of Ice in selected Swiss Lakes

Funded by: Meteoswiss (GCOS Switzerland)
Period: 2016-2018
Website | Final Report

 Academic services:

 Current (and past) students:

Contact details:
Address: 4800 Oak Grove Dr, MS 300-331, Pasadena, 91109  California, USA
Email :  firstname <dot> lastname [at] jpl [dot] nasa [dot] gov