Photo of Michael Felsberg

Michael Felsberg

Professor, Head of Division

My research covers a wide range of topics within artificial visual systems (AVS): three-dimensional computer vision, computational imaging, object detection, tracking, and recognition, and robot vision and autonomous systems.

The design of artificial visual systems, (AVS), has its roots in the modelling of the human visual system (HVS); an extremely challenging task that generations of researchers have attempted with limited success.

Vision is a very natural capability and it is commonly accepted that about 80% of what we perceive is vision-based. Vision’s highly intuitive nature makes it difficult for us to understand the myriad of problems associated with designing AVS, in contrast to sophisticated analytic tasks such as playing chess.

Thus AVS became a widely underestimated scientific problem, maybe one of the most underestimated problems of the past decades.

Many AI researchers believed that the real challenges were symbolic and analytic problems and visual perception was just a simple sub-problem, to be dealt with in a summer project, which obviously failed.

The truth is that computers are better than humans at playing chess, but even a small child has better generic vision capabilities than any artificial system.

My research aims at improving AVS capabilities substantially, driven by an HVS-inspired approach, as AVS are supposed to coexist with – and therefore predict actions of – humans.

  • My Google Scholar profile
  • Michael Felsberg - Highest ranked AI researcher in Sweden, Vinnova AI report

    Quick Facts

    Scientific Merits (selection)

    Over 34800 citations, h-index 59, i10-index 173.
    2025 Keynote at the Northern Lights Deep Learning Conference, Norway
    2025 Keynote at the Nordic AI Meet, Sweden
    2025 Keynote at the NeurIPS Workshop Learning to Sense, U.S./virtual

    Awards (selection)

    2021 Best paper award, VISAPP, Vienna.
    2021 Honorable Mention, DAGM GCPR, Germany
    2022 & 2024 Paper awards, SSBA, Sweden
    2022-2024 Reviewer awards, ICML, NeurIPS, ECAI, and ECCV
    2024 & 2025 Fellow of IAPR, ELLIS, and AAIA

    Positions of Trust (selection)

    2020 WASP Management, Executive Committee, University Representative, and management groups for Research, Arenas, and International
    2021 WASP Area Cluster Leader, Machine Learning
    2022 LiU board, Faculty representative
    2025 & 2026 Area Chair CVPR, NeurIPS, ICML, and ECCV

    Publications

    Alkis Sygkounas, Ioannis Athanasiadis, Andreas Persson, Michael Felsberg, Amy Loutfi,  Interactive Double Deep Q-network, 2025 IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV), IEEE Symposium on Intelligent Vehicle, pp. 2325-2332, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) (2025)  https://doi.org/10.1109/iv64158.2025.11097638

    Alkis Sygkounas, Ioannis Athanasiadis, Andreas Persson, Michael Felsberg, Amy Loutfi, Interactive Double Deep Q-network: Integrating Human Interventions and Evaluative Predictions in Reinforcement Learning of Autonomous Driving (2025)  https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.01440

    Arnold Brosch, Abdelrahman Eldesokey, Michael Felsberg, Kira Maag, Out-of-Distribution Segmentation via Wasserstein-Based Evidential Uncertainty (2025)  https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.11373

    Arvi Jonnarth, Ola Johansson, Jie Zhao, Michael Felsberg,  Sim-to-Real Transfer of Deep Reinforcement Learning Agents for Online Coverage Path Planning, IEEE Access 13:106883-106905 (2025)  https://doi.org/10.1109/access.2025.3581035  https://doi.org/10.1109/access.2025.3581035 https://liu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1990716/FULLTEXT02.pdf

    Ashmal Vayani, Dinura Dissanayake, Hasindri Watawana, Noor Ahsan, Nevasini Sasikumar, Omkar Thawakar, Henok Biadglign Ademtew, Yahya Hmaiti, Amandeep Kumar, Kartik Kuckreja, Mykola Maslych, Wafa Al Ghallabi, Mihail Mihaylov, Chao Qin, Abdelrahman M. Shaker, Mike Zhang, Mahardika Krisna Ihsani, Amiel Esplana, Monil Gokani, Shachar Mirkin, Harsh Singh, Ashay Srivastava, Endre Hamerlik, Fathinah Asma Izzati, Fadillah Adamsyah Maani, Sebastian Cavada, Jenny Chim, Rohit Gupta, Sanjay Manjunath, Kamila Zhumakhanova, Feno Heriniaina Rabevohitra, Azril Amirudin, Muhammad Ridzuan, Daniya Kareem, Ketan More, Kunyang Li, Pramesh Shakya, Muhammad Saad, Amirpouya Ghasemaghaei, Amirbek Djanibekov, Dilshod Azizov, Branislava Jankovic, Naman Bhatia, Alvaro Cabrera, Johan Obando-Ceron, Olympiah Otieno, Fabian Farestam, Muztoba Rabbani, Sanoojan Baliah, Santosh Sanjeev, Abduragim Shtanchaev, Maheen Fatima, Thao Nguyen, Amrin Kareem, Toluwani Aremu, Nathan Xavier, Amit Bhatkal, Hawau Toyin, Aman Chadha, Hisham Cholakkal, Rao Muhammad Anwer, Michael Felsberg, Jorma Laaksonen, Thamar Solorio, Monojit Choudhury, Ivan Laptev, Mubarak Shah, Salman Khan, Fahad Khan,  All Languages Matter: Evaluating LMMs on Culturally Diverse 100 Languages, 2025 IEEE/CVF CONFERENCE ON COMPUTER VISION AND PATTERN RECOGNITION (CVPR), IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 19565-19575, IEEE COMPUTER SOC (2025)  https://doi.org/10.1109/CVPR52734.2025.01822

    News

    Michael Felsberg, professor

    Michael Felsberg: Deep learning led to a gold rush

    “We have been teaching deep learning in both undergraduate and postgraduate courses for several years", says Michael Felsberg, one of Sweden’s best AI researchers.

    Participants are listening to a lecture.

    Symposium aiming to improve the climate

    In the fall of 2024, Linköping University once again hosted ELLIIT's five-week-long focus period. This guest researcher program aimed for greater breadth in interdisciplinarity this year, with the theme of machine learning for climate science.

    Two men and a woman talk in front of a screen

    Machine learning can give the climate a chance

    Machine learning can help us discover new patterns and better tackle the climate crisis. Researchers from all over the world meet at Linköping University with the goal of finding and deepening collaborations in this area.

    The supercomputer Berzelius photographed with fisheye lens.

    Swedish AI research gets more muscle

    The supercomputer Berzelius was inaugurated in the spring of 2021, and was then Sweden's fastest supercomputer for AI. Yet, more power is needed to meet the needs of Swedish AI research.

    Portrait of Michael Felsberg with closed eyes.

    Human vision – a challenge for AI

    Achieving diversity in human vision is one of the major challenges for AI research. In the vast majority of cases, we are better than machines at understanding the world around us. But machines are catching up – slowly but surely.

    Goutam Bhat

    A computer algorithm to recognise and follow objects

    Master's graduate Goutam Bhat has been awarded the Christer Gilén Scholarship for 2019 in the field of statistics and machine learning. The scholarship recognises his work in computer vision.

    Research 

    Staff at CVL

    About the Division

    About the Department