Timo Lüddecke

Timo Lüddecke

Research Group Leader
Institute of Computer Science
University of Göttingen

I develop machine learning methods for computer vision that learn efficiently from limited data and labels, with a focus on dense prediction, multi-modal learning, and extending foundation models. Current directions include spatiotemporal and 3D/4D understanding and making strong vision backbones accessible through lightweight, data-efficient readouts. Much of my work is interdisciplinary, including primate behavior analysis, vibroacoustic engineering, remote sensing, and neuroscience.

Group Members

Former Members

If you are intersted in joining my group, please write an email directly to me.

Short Bio

Before starting my research group in January 2024, I worked as a postdoc with Alexander Ecker. I completed my PhD in 2019 with Florentin Wörgötter working on robotic perception at the University of Göttingen. I received Bachelor and Master from the University of Magdeburg with an emphasis on medical image processing working with Klaus Tönnies.

Selected Publications

See Google Scholar for an up-to-date and complete list of publications.

TrAction: Action Recognition with Sparse Trajectories

Jan Frederik Meier, Felix Benjamin Müller, Alexander S. Ecker, Timo Lüddecke

NeurIPS 2026

LiDeRe: A Lightweight Readout for Fast and Data-Efficient Dense Prediction

Timo Lüddecke, Jan Frederik Meier, Jan van Delden, Alexander S. Ecker

Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2026

PriVi: Towards a General-Purpose Video Model for Primate Behavior in the Wild

Felix Benjamin Müller, Jan Frederik Meier, Timo Lüddecke, Richard Vogg, ..., Alexander Ecker

Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2026

A Circular Argument: Does RoPE need to be Equivariant for Vision?

Chase van de Geijn, Timo Lüddecke, Polina Turishcheva, Alexander S Ecker

NeurIPS 2025

Link

Detection transformer-based approach for mapping trees outside forests on high resolution satellite imagery

Tao Jiang, Maximilian Freudenberg, Christoph Kleinn, Timo Lüddecke, Alexander Ecker, Nils Nölke

Ecological Informatics 2025

Link

Learning to Predict Structural Vibrations

Jan van Delden, Julius Schultz, Christopher Blech, Sabine C Langer, and Timo Lüddecke

Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2024

Link Code

Computer Vision for Primate Behavior Analysis in the Wild

Richard Vogg*, Timo Lüddecke*, Jonathan Henrich*, Sharmita Dey, Matthias Nuske, Valentin Hassler, Derek Murphy, Julia Fischer, Julia Ostner, Oliver Schülke, and others

Nature Methods, 2024

Link

An unsupervised map of excitatory neuron dendritic morphology in the mouse visual cortex

Marissa A. Weis, Stelios Papadopoulos, Laura Hansel, Timo Lüddecke, Brendan Celii, ..., Alexander S. Ecker

Nature Communications, 2024

GPT4GEO: How a Language Model Sees the World's Geography

Jonathan Roberts, Timo Lüddecke, Sowmen Das, Kai Han, and Samuel Albanie

NeurIPS 2023 Workshop on Foundation Models for Decision Making, 2023

Link Code

Self-supervised graph representation learning for neuronal morphologies

Marissa A Weis, Laura Pede, Timo Lüddecke, and Alexander S Ecker

Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR), 2023

Link Code

Image Segmentation Using Text and Image Prompts

Timo Lüddecke, and Alexander Ecker

Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2022

Link Code

One-shot multi-path planning for robotic applications using fully convolutional networks

Tomas Kulvicius, Sebastian Herzog, Timo Lüddecke, Minija Tamosiunaite, and Florentin Wörgötter

International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2020

Link

Fine-grained action plausibility rating

Timo Lüddecke, and Florentin Wörgötter

Robotics and Autonomous Systems (RAS), 2020

Link

CNNs can efficiently trace paths, too

Timo Lüddecke, and Alexander Ecker

NeurIPS 2020 Workshop SVRHM, 2020

Link

Distributional Semantics of Objects in Visual Scenes in Comparison to Text

Timo Lüddecke, Alejandro Agostini, Michael Fauth, Minija Tamosiunaite, and Florentin Wörgötter

Artificial Intelligence, 2019

Link

Context-based Affordance Segmentation from 2D Images for Robot Action

Timo Lüddecke, Tomas Kulvicius, and Florentin Wörgötter

Robotics and Autonomous Systems (RAS), 2019

Link

Learning to Segment Affordances

Timo Lüddecke, and Florentin Wörgötter

International Conference on Computer Vision Workshops (ICCVW), 2017

Link

Convolutional Neural Networks for Movement Prediction in Videos

Alexander Warnecke, Timo Lüddecke, and Florentin Wörgötter

German Conference on Pattern Recognition (GCPR), 2017

Action-oriented Scene Understanding

Timo Lüddecke

PhD Thesis

Link


Open Source Software

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DrawCNN

DrawCNN is a python script to visualize CNN architectures and export to SVG for later refinement.

Code

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Tralo

Tralo is a dependency-free training and experiment framework for PyTorch.

Code