Lea Müller
I like training neural networks to
perceive human behavior.
I am a Postdoctoral Researcher at UC Berkeley, CA, USA, under the mentorship of Angjoo Kanazawa and Jitendra Malik. Before that, I was a PhD student at the Max-Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen, Germany, in the Perceiving Systems Department lead by Michael Black. During the third year of my PhD, I got to visit UC Berkeley for six months to work with Angjoo Kanazawa. I was further lucky to be advised by Kathereine Kuchenbecker and Gerard Pons-Moll who are part of my thesis advisory committee and to collaborate with senior researchers like Chun-Hao Paul Huang, Dimitris Tzionas, and Georgios Pavlakos. Before my PhD, I received my M.Sc. in Computational and Data Science from the University of Jena. My Master's thesis project was advised by Joachim Denzler, Maha Shadaydeh, and Dana Schneider. In my Bachelor's, I studied Mathematics with Psychology as an application subject at the University of Heidelberg.
Research
My research area is computer vision, in particular 3D virtual humans, their physical appearance and social interactions. This involves estimating 3D human pose and shape from an image for a single person, but also for multiple people who interact, for example, while shaking hands or hugging. My goal is to understand how humans interact, communicate, and behave towards each other at scale.
Here is a short blog post that uses some of our research on body shape estimation during the German Election (Bundestagswahl) 2021. It is written for everyone, also for those not working in computer vision.
I am open to collaborations. If you are interested, please send an email to
mueller (at) berkeley.edu
News
2024-03-14 I successfully defended my dissertation SUMMA CUM LAUDE.
2023-12-07 I will give a talk about contact in 3D human mesh reconstruction at the 46th Pattern Recognition and Computer Vision Colloquium at Prague University
2023-12-04 I will start a PostDoc position at UC Berkeley in January with Jitendra Malik and Angjoo Kanazawa ✨
2023-11-07 I was featured in the IMPRS-IS Spotlight Scholar Session with a short article
2023-07-14 I received the 2023 MPI-IS Outstanding Female Doctoral Student Honorable Mention Prize ✨
2022-06-15 I joined Angjoo Kanazawa's group at UC Berkeley for a six-month research visit
Selected Projects
Generative Proxemics: A Prior for 3D Social Interaction from Images
Lea Müller, Vickie Ye, Georgios Pavlakos, Michael Black, Angjoo Kanazawa
CVPR 2024
[project page] [paper] [code]
Accurate 3D Body Shape Regression using Metric and Semantic Attributes
Vasilious Choutas*, Lea Müller*, Chun-Hao Paul Huang, Dimitris Tzionas, Michael Black
*equal contribution
CVPR 2022
Best Paper Award Nominee, Oral Presentation
[project page] [paper] [code]
On Self-Contact and Human Pose
Lea Müller, Ahmed A. A. Osman, Siyu Tang, Chun-Hao Paul Huang, Michael Black
CVPR 2021
Best Paper Award Nominee, Oral Presentation
[project page] [paper] [code]
Analyzing the Direction of Emotional Influence in Nonverbal Dyadic Communication: A Facial-Expression Study
Maha Shadaydeh*, Lea Müller*, Dana Schneider*, Martin Thümmel, Thomas Kessler, Joachim Denzler
*equal contribution
IEEE Access 2021
[paper]