I'm a postdoctoral researcher in the Real Virtual Humans group headed by Prof. Gerard Pons-Moll at the University of Tübingen in Germany. My research focus is robust and efficient 3D human understanding. Among others, I am excited about research on holistic capture of humans in context, as well as uncertainty-aware semi- and self-supervised learning for human-related tasks.
I did my PhD in Prof. Bastian Leibe’s Computer Vision Group at RWTH Aachen University in Germany. That work was funded in part through a scholarship of the Bosch Research Foundation. My methods have won 3D human pose estimation competitions at ECCV 2018 and 2020, and I have received Outstanding Reviewer Awards at CVPR 2021 and 2022.
Before that, I completed my master’s in Computer Science also at RWTH Aachen, where I initially worked on medical image processing with Prof. Thomas M. Deserno, then joined Prof. Bastian Leibe’s Computer Vision Group as a student research assistant and wrote my master’s thesis on visual crowd counting and pedestrian flow analysis. Prior to that, I received my bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics in my native Hungary, with a thesis on machine learning approaches for natural language processing in medical diagnosis classification.
News
- [2026-06] Co-organizing the CVPR 2026 Workshop on 3D Human Mesh Modeling and Recovery from RGB and LiDAR in Denver, USA.
- [2026-05] Gave an invited talk at the 52nd Pattern Recognition and Computer Vision Colloquium in Prague, Czech Republic.
- [2025-11] Our STAGE paper is accepted at 3DV 2026!
- [2025-05] Gave a seminar talk at the ICRA 2025 Workshop on Enhancing Human Mobility in Atlanta, USA.
- [2024-12] Presented NLF at NeurIPS 2024 in Vancouver, Canada.
- [2024-08] Gave a talk at the Perceiving Systems group at MPI Tübingen.
- [2023-12] Defended my PhD thesis!
- [2023-03] Joined the Real Virtual Humans research group at the University of Tübingen!
- [2023-01] Gave an invited talk at Adobe Research in San Jose, California, USA.
- [2023-01] Presented a paper at WACV 2023 in Waikoloa, Hawaii, USA.
- [2022-11] Showcased our work at the neuroAIx Frontiers Workshop in Aachen, Germany.
- [2022-10] Presented a live demo at ECCV 2022 in Tel Aviv, Israel.
- [2022-07] Gave a talk at the Real Virtual Humans research group at the University of Tübingen, Germany.
- [2022-06] Attended CVPR 2022 in New Orleans, USA, where I received an Outstanding Reviewer Award.
Publications
BibTeX
@article{kister2026inhabit,
title = {InHabit: Leveraging Image Foundation Models for Scalable 3D Human Placement},
author = {Kister, Nikita and YM, Pradyumna and S\'ar\'andi, Istv\'an and Wang, Jiayi and Khoreva, Anna and Pons-Moll, Gerard},
journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.19673},
year = {2026}
}
BibTeX
@article{ym2026graft,
title = {GRAFT: Geometric Refinement and Fitting Transformer for Human Scene Reconstruction},
author = {YM, Pradyumna and Xue, Yuxuan and Chen, Yue and Kister, Nikita and S\'ar\'andi, Istv\'an and Pons-Moll, Gerard},
journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.19624},
year = {2026}
}
BibTeX
@inproceedings{stage,
title = {Are Pose Estimators Ready for the Open World? STAGE: A GenAI Toolkit for Auditing 3D Human Pose Estimators},
author = {Kister, Nikita and S\'ar\'andi, Istv\'an and Wang, Jiayi and Khoreva, Anna and Pons-Moll, Gerard},
booktitle = {International Conference on 3D Vision (3DV)},
year = {2026}
}
BibTeX
@inproceedings{sarandi2023acae,
title = {Learning {3D} Human Pose Estimation from Dozens of Datasets using a Geometry-Aware Autoencoder to Bridge Between Skeleton Formats},
author = {S\'ar\'andi, Istv\'an and Hermans, Alexander and Leibe, Bastian},
booktitle = {IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV)},
year = {2023}
}
(Special Journal Issue: Selected Best Works From Automated Face and Gesture Recognition)
BibTeX
@article{Sarandi2021metrabs,
title = {{MeTRAbs:} Metric-Scale Truncation-Robust Heatmaps for Absolute {3D} Human Pose Estimation},
author = {S\'ar\'andi, Istv\'an and Linder, Timm and Arras, Kai O. and Leibe, Bastian},
journal = {IEEE Transactions on Biometrics, Behavior, and Identity Science (T-BIOM)},
year = {2021},
volume = {3},
number = {1},
pages = {16--30}
}
BibTeX
@inproceedings{Sarandi2020metro,
title = {Metric-Scale Truncation-Robust Heatmaps for 3{D} Human Pose Estimation},
author = {S\'ar\'andi, Istv\'an and Linder, Timm and Arras, Kai O. and Leibe, Bastian},
booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG)},
year = {2020}
}
BibTeX
@inproceedings{Pfeiffer2019multitask,
title = {Visual Person Understanding Through Multi-task and Multi-dataset Learning},
author = {Pfeiffer, Kilian and Hermans, Alexander and S\'ar\'andi, Istv\'{a}n and Weber, Mark and Leibe, Bastian},
booktitle = {German Conference on Pattern Recognition (GCPR)},
date = {2019}
}
BibTeX
@article{Sarandi2018synthetic,
title = {Synthetic Occlusion Augmentation with Volumetric Heatmaps for the 2018 {ECCV PoseTrack Challenge} on {3D} Human Pose Estimation},
author = {S\'ar\'andi, Istv\'an and Linder, Timm and Arras, Kai O. and Leibe, Bastian},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:1809.04987},
year = {2018}
}
BibTeX
@inproceedings{Sarandi2018occlusion,
title = {How Robust is {3D} Human Pose Estimation to Occlusion?},
author = {S\'ar\'andi, Istv\'an and Linder, Timm and Arras, Kai O. and Leibe, Bastian},
booktitle = {IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems Workshops (IROSW)},
year = {2018}
}
Medical Informatics Publications (2013–14)
Theses
BibTeX
@mastersthesis{Sarandi2015mastersthesis,
title = {Pedestrian Line Counting by Probabilistic Combination of Flow and Appearance Information},
author = {S\'ar\'andi, Istv\'an},
school = {RWTH Aachen University},
year = {2015}
}
BibTeX
@mastersthesis{Sarandi2011bachelorsthesis,
title = {Eg\'eszs\'eg\"ugyi K\'odol\'ast\'amogat\'o Rendszer Fejleszt\'ese},
author = {S\'ar\'andi, Istv\'an},
type = {Bachelor's thesis},
school = {Budapest University of Technology and Economics},
year = {2011}
}
Term Papers
Supervised Theses
BibTeX
@mastersthesis{Erlbeck2022mastersthesis,
title = {Temporal Modeling of 3D Human Poses in Multi-Person Interaction Scenarios},
author = {Erlbeck, Stefan},
school = {RWTH Aachen University},
year = {2022}
}
BibTeX
@mastersthesis{Liu2021mastersthesis,
title = {Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation using Depth as Privileged Information},
author = {Liu, Yinglun},
school = {RWTH Aachen University},
year = {2021}
}
Teaching Assistance
- Winter 2021/22
- Summer 2021
- Winter 2020/21
- Summer 2020
- Winter 2019/20
- Summer 2019
- Summer 2018
- Winter 2017/18