Welcome to my homepage! I am a Senior Research Manager at NVIDIA Research, where I lead the Digital Human AI Research (DAIR) team. My work focuses on improving the entire digital human creation process, including capture, modeling, synthesis, and animation, with an emphasis on both appearance and dynamic characteristics. I earned my PhD in Computer Science (2014-2018) from the University of Bonn, Germany, under the guidance of Prof. Juergen Gall. Prior to that, I completed my masters (2011-2013) in Finland and undergrad (2006-2010) in Pakistan. I developed my passion for computer vision and machine learning in 2009 during my undergrad thesis on vehicle make and model recognition and have been in love with the field ever since. Now I mostly work at the intersection of computer vision, graphics, and machine learning, with a particular emphasis on 3D digital humans.

We are always looking for motivated research interns. Feel free to reach out if you are interested.

News!

25/06/2025:Four papers accepted to ICCV 2025 including GENMO, GeoMan, AdaHuman, and HumanOLAT.

05/05/2025:GENMO is available on arXiv. Generate human motions from multiple modalities including text, audio, and video.

12/12/2024:SimAvatar is accepted to CVPR 2025. Generate SimReady avatars with just text prompts.

22/01/2024:A paper on text-driven 3D human motion generation is now available on arXiv.

05/01/2024:What You See is What You GAN, now available on arXiv.

18/12/2023:GAvatar is available on arXiv now. Make Gaussian avatars using simple text descriptions.

Publications

2025

GENMO: A GENarlist Model for Human MOtion
Jiefeng Li, Jinkun Cao, Haotian Zhang, Davis Rempe, Jan Kautz, Umar Iqbal, Ye Yuan
ICCV 2025
GeoMan: Temporally Consistent Human Geometry Estimation using Image-to-Video Diffusion
Gwanghyun Kim, Xueting Li, Ye Yuan, Koki Nagano, Tianye Li, Jan Kautz, Se Young Chun, Umar Iqbal
ICCV 2025
AdaHuman: Animatable Detailed 3D Human Generation with Compositional Multiview Diffusion
Yangyi Huang, Ye Yuan, Xueting Li, Jan Kautz, Umar Iqbal
ICCV 2025
HumanOLAT: A Large-Scale Dataset for Full-Body Human Relighting and Novel-View Synthesis
Timo Teufel, Xilong Zhou, Umar Iqbal, Pramod Rao, Pulkit Gera, Jan Kautz, Vladislav Golyanik, Christian Theobalt
ICCV 2025
SimAvatar: Simulation-Ready Avatars with Layered Hair and Clothing
Xueting Li, Ye Yuan, Shalini De Mello, Gilles Daviet, Jonathan Leaf, Miles Macklin, Jan Kautz, Umar Iqbal
CVPR 2025
VideoPanda: Panoramic Video Diffusion with Multi-view Attention
Kevin Xie*, Amirmojtaba Sabour*, Jiahui Huang, Despoina Paschalidou, Greg Klar, Umar Iqbal, Sanja Fidler, Xiaohui Zeng
arXiv 2025

2024

COIN: Control-Inpainting Diffusion Prior for Human and Camera Motion Estimation
Jiefeng Li, Ye Yuan, Davis Rempe, Haotian Zhang, Pavlo Molchanov, Cewu Lu, Jan Kautz, Umar Iqbal
ECCV 2024
Multi-Track Timeline Control for Text-Driven 3D Human Motion Generation
Mathis Petrovich, Or Litany, Umar Iqbal, Michael J. Black, Gul Varol, Xue Bin Peng, Davis Rempe
CVPR Workshop on Human Motion Generation 2024
What You See is What You GAN: Rendering Every Pixel for High-Fidelity Geometry in 3D GANs
Alex Trevithick, Matthew Chan, Towaki Takikawa, Umar Iqbal, Shalini De Mello, Manmohan Chandraker, Ravi Ramamoorthi, Koki Nagano
CVPR 2024
GAvatar: Animatable 3D Gaussian Avatars with Implicit Mesh Learning
Ye Yuan, Xueting Li, Yangyi Huang, Shalini De Mello, Koki Nagano, Jan Kautz, Umar Iqbal
CVPR 2024
PACE: Human and Camera Motion Estimation from in-the-wild Videos
Muhammed Kocabas, Ye Yuan, Pavlo Molchanov, Yunrong Guo, Michael J. Black, Otmar Hilliges, Jan Kautz, Umar Iqbal
3DV 2024

2023

Generalizable One-shot Neural Head Avatar
Xueting Li, Shalini De Mello, Sifei Liu, Koki Nagano, Umar Iqbal, Jan Kautz
NeurIPs 2023
RANA: Relightable Articulated Neural Avatars
Umar Iqbal, Akin Caliskan, Koki Nagano, Sameh Khamis, Pavlo Molchanov, Jan Kautz
ICCV, 2023
PhysDiff: Physics-Guided Human Motion Diffusion Model
Ye Yuan, Jiaming Song, ​Umar Iqbal, Arash Vahdat, Jan Kautz
ICCV, 2023
Learning Human Dynamics in Autonomous Driving Scenarios
Jingbo Wang, Ye Yuan, Zhengyi Luo, Kevin Xie, Dahua Lin, Umar Iqbal, Sanja Fidler, Sameh Khamis
ICCV, 2023
SSIF: Single-shot Implicit Morphable Faces with Consistent Texture Parameterization
Connor Lin, Koki Nagano, Jan Kautz, Eric R. Chan, Umar Iqbal, Leonidas Guibas, Gordon Wetzstein, Sameh Khamis
SIGGRAPH 2023

2022

DRaCoN – Differentiable Rasterization Conditioned Neural Radiance Fields for Articulated Avatars
Amit Raj,Umar Iqbal, Koki Nagano, Sameh Khamis, Pavlo Molchanov, James Hays, Jan Kautz
arXiv Preprint 2022
Watch It Move: Unsupervised Discovery of 3D Joints for Re-Posing of Articulated Objects
Atsuhiro Noguchi, Umar Iqbal, Jonathan Tremblay, Tatsuya Harada, Orazio Gallo
IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2022
GLAMR: Global Occlusion-Aware Human Mesh Recovery with Dynamic Cameras
Ye Yuan, Umar Iqbal, Pavlo Molchanov, Kris Kitani, Jan Kautz
IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2022

2021

Physics-based Human Motion Estimation and Synthesis from Videos
Kevin Xie, Tingwu Wang, Umar Iqbal, Yunrong Guo, Sanja Fidler, Florian Shkurti
IEEE Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021
KAMA: 3D Keypoint Aware Body Mesh Articulation
Umar Iqbal, , Kevin Xie, Yunrong Guo, Jan Kautz, Pavlo Molchanov
International Conference on 3D Vision (3DV), 2021
Self-Supervised Object Detection via Generative Image Synthesis
Siva K. Mustikovela, Shalini De Mello, Aayush Prakash, Umar Iqbal, Sifei Liu, Thu Nguyen-Phuoc, Carsten Rother, Jan Kautz
IEEE Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021
​Adversarial Motion Modelling helps Semi-supervised Hand Pose Estimation
Adrian Spurr, Pavlo Molchanov, Umar Iqbal, Jan Kautz, Otmar Hilliges
arXiv 2021
​Weakly-Supervised Physically Unconstrained Gaze Estimation
Rakshit Kothari, Shalini De Mello, Umar Iqbal, Wonmin Byeon, Seonwook Park, Jan Kautz
IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021
​Learning to Track Instances without Video Annotations
Yang Fu, Sifei Liu, Umar Iqbal, Shalini De Mello, Humphrey Shi , Jan Kautz
IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021
DexYCB: A Benchmark for Capturing Hand Grasping of Objects
Yu-Wei Chao, Wei Yang, Yu Xiang, Pavlo Molchanov, Ankur Handa, Jonathan Tremblay, Yashraj Narang, Karl Van Wyk, Umar Iqbal, Stan Birchfield, Jan Kautz, Dieter Fox
IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021

2020

Weakly-Supervised 3D Hand Pose Estimation via Biomechanical Constraints
Adrian Spurr, Umar Iqbal, Pavlo Molchanov, Otmar Hilliges, Jan Kautz
European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020.
Measuring Generalisation to Unseen Viewpoints, Articulations, Shapes and Objects for 3D Hand Pose Estimation under Hand-Object Interaction
Anil Armagan, Guillermo Garcia-Hernando, Seungryul Baek, Shreyas Hampali, Mahdi Rad, Zhaohui Zhang, Shipeng Xie, MingXiu Chen, Boshen Zhang, Fu Xiong, Yang Xiao, Zhiguo Cao, Junsong Yuan, Pengfei Ren, Weiting Huang, Haifeng Sun, Marek Hrúz, Jakub Kanis, Zdeněk Krňoul, Qingfu Wan, Shile Li, Linlin Yang, Dongheui Lee, Angela Yao, Weiguo Zhou, Sijia Mei, Yunhui Liu, Adrian Spurr, Umar Iqbal, Pavlo Molchanov, Philippe Weinzaepfel, Romain Brégier, Gregory Rogez, Vincent Lepetit, Tae-Kyun Kim
European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020.
Weakly-Supervised 3D Human Pose Learning via Multi-view Images in the Wild
Umar Iqbal, Pavlo Molchanov, Jan Kautz
IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), Seattle, USA, 2020.
​Self-Supervised Viewpoint Learning from Image Collections
Siva Karthik Mustikovela, Varun Jampani, Shalini De Mello, Sifei Liu, Umar Iqbal, Carsten Rother, Jan Kautz
IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), Seattle, USA, 2020.

2019 and earlier...

Few Shot Adaptive Gaze Estimation
Seonwook Park, Shalini De Mello, Pavlo Molchanov, Umar Iqbal, Otmar Hilliges, Jan Kautz
International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), Seoul, South Korea, 2019
Articulated Human Pose Estimation in Unconstrained Images and Videos
Dissertation, University of Bonn, Germany, 2018.
Summa cum laude, DAGM MVTec Dissertation Award 2019
Hand Pose Estimation via Latent 2.5D Heatmap Regression
U. Iqbal, P. Molchanov, T. Breuel, J. Gall and J. Kautz
European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV'18), Munich, Germany, 2018
Invited to the 4th Workshop on Observing and Understanding Hands in Action (HANDS), 2018
Best Poster Award @ HANDS'18
JointFlow: Temporal Flow Fields for Multi Person Pose Tracking
A. Doering, U. Iqbal, J. Gall
British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC'18), Newcastle, UK, 2018
​PoseTrack: A Benchmark for Human Pose Estimation and Tracking
M. Andriluka, U. Iqbal, A. Milan, E. Insafutdinov, L. Pishchulin, J. Gall and B. Schiele
IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR'18), Salt Lake City, USA, 2018
A Dual-Source Approach for 3D Human Pose Estimation from Single Images
U. Iqbal, A. Doering, H. Yasin, B. Krüger, A. Weber, and J. Gall
Computer Vision and Image Understanding (CVIU), 2018
PoseTrack: Joint Multi-Person Pose Estimation and Tracking
U. Iqbal, A. Milan, and J. Gall
IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR'17), Hawaii, USA, July 2017
​Pose for Action - Action for Pose
U. Iqbal, M. Garbade, and J. Gall
IEEE Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG'17), Washington-DC, USA, 2017
​Multi-Person Pose Estimation with Local Joint-to-Person Associations
U. Iqbal and J. Gall
Crowd Understanding Workshop (CUW). In conjunction with ECCV'16, Amsterdam, 2016
​​A Dual-Source Approach for 3D Pose Estimation from a Single Image
H. Yasin*, U. Iqbal*, B. Krüger, A. Weber, and J. Gall (*equal contribution)
IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR'16), Las Vegas, USA, June 2016.
​Who is the Hero? - Semi-Supervised Person Re-Identification in Videos
U. Iqbal , I. D. D. Curcio, and M. Gabbouj
Int. Conference on Computer Vision Theory and Applications (VISAPP'14), Lisbon, Portugal, 2014
Image Based Vehicle Type Identification
U. Iqbal , S.W. Zamir, M.H. Shahid, K. Parwaiz, M. Yasin and M.S. Sarfraz
IEEE International Conference on Information and Emerging Technologies (ICIET'10, Oral), ​Pakistan, 2010.