Erkut Erdem

Professor

Computer Vision Laboratory (HUCVL)
Dept. of Computer Engineering
Hacettepe University

Office: 112
Address: Beytepe Campus, Ankara, Turkey TR-06800
e-mail: erkut at cs dot hacettepe dot edu dot tr
Phone: +90 312 297 7500 / 122
Fax: +90 (312) 297 7502

My research focuses on advancing computational methods for visual data analysis and modeling.

Current research interests: Generative AI • Computer Vision • Language Understanding

Hacettepe University Faculty Member 2010-now
Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications Post-doctoral Researcher 2009-2010
Middle East Technical University 1997-2008 Ph.D., 2008 M.Sc., 2003 B.Sc., 2001
University of California Los Angeles Visiting Researcher Oct. 2007 - Dec. 2007
Virginia Bioinformatics Institute, Virginia Tech Visiting Researcher Jul. 2004 - Aug. 2004

News and highlights

So excited to announce that I am co-affiliated with Koç University and İş Bank Artificial Intelligence Center (KUIS AI) as a research fellow.

I'm looking for motivated MSc/PhD students. Scholarships are available, please send me your CV if interested!

[August 2025]: Our work on audio-visual saliency prediction in 360 degree videos will be published in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.

[June 2025]: Our work on efficient representation of videos got accepted to ICCV 2025.

[November 2024]: Awarded funding from TUBITAK 2247-A - National Outstanding Researchers Program on generative AI approaches for healthcare and remote sensing.

[September 2024]: Our work on diffusion-based object removal from images accepted to NeurIPS 2024.

[September 2024]: Our work on a GAN-based unified framework for domain adaptation, image synthesis and manipulation accepted to SIGGRAPH Asia 2024.

[March 2024]: Our work on sequential compositional generalization in multimodal models accepted to NAACL 2024.

[February 2024]: Our work on video synthesis from events will be published in IEEE Transactions on Image Processing.

[January 2024]: Our work on evaluating zero-shot linguistic and temporal understanding capabilities of video-language models accepted to ICLR 2024.

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Curriculum Vitae (as of December 2025)

Projects

As Principal Investigator

Project Duration: 3 years (2025-2028)
Sponsors: TUBITAK 2247-A - National Outstanding Researchers Program (Award# 123C542)
project page

Seeing Through Events: End-to-End Approaches to Event-Based Vision Under Extremely Low-Light Conditions

Project Duration: 3 years (2022-2025)
Sponsors: TUBITAK 1001 - Support Program for Scientific and Technological Research Projects (Award# 121E454)
project page

A Multimodal and Multilingual Framework for Video Captioning

Project Duration: 2 years (2018-2020)
Sponsors: TUBITAK and British Council - Newton-Katip Çelebi Fund Institutional Links Grant Programme (Award# 217E054)
project page

Using Synthetic Data for Deep Person Re-Identification

Project Duration: 2 years (2018-2020)
Sponsors: TUBITAK 1001 - Support Program for Scientific and Technological Research Projects (Award# 217E029)
project page

Understanding Images and Visualizing Text: Semantic Inference and Retrieval by Integrating Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing

Project Duration: 3 years (2014-2017)
Sponsors: TUBITAK 1001 - Support Program for Scientific and Technological Research Projects (Award# 113E116) and European Union under European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) Programme (ICT COST IC1037 Action)
project page

The Use of Multiple Cues and Contextual Knowledge in Computer Vision

Project Duration: 3 years (2012-2015)
Sponsors: TUBITAK 3501 - Career Development Program (Award# 112E146)
project page

As Co-Investigator

Seeing the Invisible: End-to-End Approaches for Hyperspectral Image Enhancement and Synthesis

Project Duration: 30 months (2023-2026)
Sponsors: TUBITAK 1001 - Support Program for Scientific and Technological Research Projects (Award# 123E385)
project page

Quality Assessment of 360-Degree Videos Guided by Audio-Visual Saliency

Project Duration: 3 years (2021-2024)
Sponsors: TUBITAK 1001 - Support Program for Scientific and Technological Research Projects (Award# 120E501)
project page

Summarization Approaches Towards Interpreting Big Visual Data

Project Duration: 3 years (2017-2020)
Sponsors: TUBITAK 1003 - Primary Subjects R&D Funding Program (Award# 116E685)
project page

City-Wide Video Surveillance System

Project Duration: 3 years (2016-2019)
Sponsors: TUBITAK 1007 - Public Institutions Research Funding Program (Award# 114G028)
project page

Selected Publications

ViLMA: A Zero-Shot Benchmark for Linguistic and Temporal Grounding in Video-Language Models,
I. Kesen, A. Pedrotti, M. Dogan, M. Cafagna, E. C. Acikgoz, L. Parcalabescu, I. Calixto, A. Frank, A. Gatt, A. Erdem, E. ErdemThe International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2024),, Vienna, Austria, May 2024
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VidStyleODE: Disentangled Video Editing via StyleGAN and NeuralODEs,
M. H. Ali, A. Bond, T. Birdal, D. Ceylan, L. Karacan, E. Erdem, A. ErdemIEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV 2023),, Paris, France, October 2023
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CLIP-Guided StyleGAN Inversion for Text-Driven Real Image Editing,
A. C. Baykal, A. B. Anees, D. Ceylan, E. Erdem, A. Erdem, D. Yuret, ACM Transactions on Graphics, in press
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CRAFT: A Benchmark for Causal Reasoning About Forces and inTeractions,
T. Ates, M. S. Atesoglu, C. Yigit, I. Kesen, M. Kobas, E. Erdem, A. Erdem, T. Goksun, D. Yuret, Findings of ACL 2022
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Burst Photography for Learning to Enhance Extremely Dark Images,
A. S. Karadeniz, E. Erdem, A. Erdem, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, Vol. 30, pp. 9372-9385, 2021
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A Gated Fusion Network for Dynamic Saliency Prediction,
A. Kocak, E. Erdem, A. Erdem, IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems, accepted for publication
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mustGAN: multi-stream Generative Adversarial Networks for MR Image Synthesis,
M. Yurt, S. UH Dar, A. Erdem, Erkut Erdem, K. K. Oguz, T. Cukur, Medical Image Analysis, Vol. 70, May 2021
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Cross-lingual Visual Pre-training for Multimodal Machine Translation,
O. Caglayan, M. Kuyu, M. S. Amac, P. Madhyastha, E. Erdem, A. Erdem, L. Specia, The 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2021)
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:: project page (with data and code)
Belief Regulated Dual Propagation Nets for Learning Action Effects on Articulated Multi-Part Objects,
A. E. Tekden, A. Erdem, E. Erdem, M. Imre, M. Y. Seker, and E. Ugur, International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2020, Paris, France, May-June 2020
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Manipulating Attributes of Natural Scenes via Hallucination,
L. Karacan, Z. Akata, A. Erdem and E. Erdem, ACM Transactions on Graphics, accepted for publication, 2019
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:: project page (with code)
Procedural Reasoning Networks for Understanding Multimodal Procedures,
M.S. Amac, S. Yagcioglu, A. Erdem, and E. Erdem, The SIGNLL Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL), Hong Kong, November 2019
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:: project page (with code)
Image Synthesis in Multi-Contrast MRI with Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks,
S. U. H. Dar, M. Yurt, L. Karacan, A. Erdem, E. Erdem, T. Cukur, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, Vol. 38, No.10, pp. 2375-2388, October 2019
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RecipeQA: A Challenge Dataset for Multimodal Comprehension of Cooking Recipes,
S. Yagcioglu, A. Erdem, E. Erdem, and N. Ikizler-Cinbis, Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) 2018, Brussels, Belgium, October-November 2018
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:: project page (with data and leaderboard)
Spatio-Temporal Saliency Networks for Dynamic Saliency Prediction,
C. Bak, A. Kocak, E. Erdem and A. Erdem, IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, 20(7). pp. 1688-1698, July 2018.
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Image Synthesis in Multi-Contrast MRI with Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks,
S. U. H. Dar, M. Yurt, L. Karacan, A. Erdem, E. Erdem, T. Cukur, arXiv preprint arXiv:1802.01221, February 2018
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Alpha Matting with KL-Divergence Based Sparse Sampling,
L. Karacan, A. Erdem and E. Erdem, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 26(9), pp. 4523-4536, September 2017
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Re-evaluating Automatic Metrics for Image Captioning,
M. Kilickaya, A. Erdem, N. Ikizler-Cinbis and E. Erdem, The 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2017), Valencia, Spain, April 2017
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An Objective Deghosting Quality Metric for HDR Images,
O. T. Tursun, A. O. Akyuz, A. Erdem and E. Erdem, Computer Graphics Forum (Eurographics 2016), 35(2), pp. 139-152, May 2016
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Automatic Description Generation from Images: A Survey of Models, Datasets, and Evaluation Measures,
R. Bernardi, R. Cakici, D. Elliott, A. Erdem, E. Erdem, N. Ikizler-Cinbis, F. Keller, A. Muscat, B. Plank, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 55, pp. 409-442, February 2016
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Image Matting with KL-Divergence Based Sparse Sampling,
L. Karacan, A. Erdem and E. Erdem, IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV 2015),, Santiago, Chile, December 2015
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The State of the Art in HDR Deghosting: A Survey and Evaluation,
O. T. Tursun, A. O. Akyuz, A. Erdem and E. Erdem, Computer Graphics Forum (Eurographics State-of-the-art Report (STAR) 2015), 34(2), pp. 683-707, May 2015
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Structure Preserving Image Smoothing via Region Covariances,
L. Karacan, E. Erdem and A. Erdem, ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH Asia 2013), Vol. 32, No. 6, November 2013
:: project page (with code)
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Visual saliency estimation by nonlinearly integrating features using region covariances,
E. Erdem and A. Erdem, Journal of Vision, Vol. 13, No. 4, pp. 1-20, March 2013
:: project page (with code)
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For a full list of publications, please see the Publications page.

Teaching

Current

Undergraduate

BBM202: Algorithms (Spring 2025)
AIN434/BBM444: Fundamentals of Computational Photography (Spring 2025)

Past

Undergraduate

AIN311: Fundamentals of Machine Learning (Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021)
BBM101: Introduction to Programming I (Fall 2019, Fall 2017, Fall 2016, Fall 2015, Fall 2014, Fall 2013, Fall 2011, Fall 2010)
BBM202: Algorithms (Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022, Spring 2021, Spring 2020, Spring 2019, Spring 2018, Spring 2017, Spring 2016, Spring 2015, Spring 2014, Spring 2013)
BBM341: Systems Programming (Fall 2012, Spring 2012)
BBM413: Fundamentals of Image Processing (Fall 2018, Fall 2017, Fall 2016, Fall 2015, Fall 2014, Fall 2013, Fall 2012, Fall 2011, Fall 2010)
BBM406: Fundamentals of Machine Learning (Spring 2021)
AIN434/BBM444: Fundamentals of Computational Photography (Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022)

Graduate

CMP784: Deep Learning (Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021)
CMP717: Image Processing (Fall 2020, Spring 2020, Spring 2019, Spring 2018, Spring 2017, Spring 2016, Spring 2015, Spring 2014, Spring 2013, Spring 2012)
BIL722: Advanced Topics in Computer Vision (Fall 2012)
BIL741 - Advanced Analysis of Algorithms (Spring 2011)
BSB663: Image Processing (Spring 2013)
BCO511: Computer Graphics (Spring 2012)

Erkut Erdem

News and highlights

Projects

As Principal Investigator

Seeing Through Events: End-to-End Approaches to Event-Based Vision Under Extremely Low-Light Conditions

A Multimodal and Multilingual Framework for Video Captioning

Using Synthetic Data for Deep Person Re-Identification

Understanding Images and Visualizing Text: Semantic Inference and Retrieval by Integrating Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing

The Use of Multiple Cues and Contextual Knowledge in Computer Vision

As Co-Investigator

Seeing the Invisible: End-to-End Approaches for Hyperspectral Image Enhancement and Synthesis

Quality Assessment of 360-Degree Videos Guided by Audio-Visual Saliency

Summarization Approaches Towards Interpreting Big Visual Data

City-Wide Video Surveillance System

Selected Publications

Students

Ph.D. Students

M.Sc. Students

Former Students

Teaching

Current

Undergraduate

Past

Undergraduate

Graduate

image courtesy: iwdrm