Bharath Hariharan

I am an associate professor in Computer Science at Cornell University. I work on computer vision and machine learning, in particular on important problems that defy the "Big Data" label. I enjoy problems that require marrying advances in machine learning with insights from computer vision, geometry and domain-specific knowledge. A sampling of the research problems my group works on is presented below; an exhaustive list of publications is available on scholar.


My work has been recognized with an NSF CAREER award and a PAMI Young Researcher Award.

My CV is here and my research statement is here.

Note to prospective PhD students: Admissions at Cornell are done through a committee. If you are interested in working with me, please directly apply through the application website and mention my name

Research

Recognition for satellite images and earth science

A variety of scientific disciplines, including environmental science and the earth sciences, need to know what is there in any place on the planet at any time. This requires recognition on satellite images as well as combining information from multiple modalities (satellite, aerial and ground) captured at the same location. Recognition on satellite images is in itself also a fundamental challenge given the absence of large labeled datasets. As part of this project, we have built one of the most accurate foundation vision-language model for satellite images as well as new self-supervised representations for satellite images.

4D Reconstruction and recognition

Humans live in a 4D world: we do not perceive independent static images, but rather a continuous video stream. On the one hand, ego-motion in video provides enough information to reconstruct the static scene and segment the moving objects, which can power recognition. On the other hand, videos depict dynamic scenes and moving objects introduce fundamental ambiguities and challenges with occlusion. Our work has shown how one can resolve ambiguities to reconstruct and segment out moving objects, as well as track surfaces through occlusion.

Representative recent publications

3D Synthesis for Architectural Design
I-Ting Tsai, Bharath Hariharan
In WACV 2025.
paper


@inproceedings{Tsai20253D, title={3D Synthesis for Architectural Design},author={Tsai, I-Ting and Hariharan, Bharath}, booktitle={WACV}, year={2025}}

Scale-aware Recognition in Satellite Images under Resource Constraints
Shreelekha Revankar, Cheng Perng Phoo, Utkarsh Mall, Bharath Hariharan, Kavita Bala
In ICLR 2025.
paper


@inproceedings{revankar2025scaleawarerecognitionsatelliteimages,title={Scale-Aware Recognition in Satellite Images under Resource Constraints}, author={Shreelekha Revankar and Cheng Perng Phoo and Utkarsh Mall and Bharath Hariharan and Kavita Bala},year={2025},booktitle={ICLR},url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.00210}, }

MOD-UV: Learning Mobile Object Detectors from Unlabeled Videos
Yihong Sun, Bharath Hariharan
In ECCV 2024.
paper


@inproceedings{mod-uv,
title={MOD-UV: Learning Mobile Object Detectors from Unlabeled Videos}, 
author={Sun, Yihong and Hariharan, Bharath}, 
booktitle={ECCV}, 
year={2024}}

Remote sensing vision-language foundation models without annotations via ground remote alignment
Utkarsh Mall, Cheng Perng Phoo, Meilin Kelsey Liu, Carl Vondrick, Bharath Hariharan, Kavita Bala
In ICLR 2024.
paper


@inproceedings{graft-24
,title={Remote sensing vision-language foundation models without annotations via ground remote alignment},
author={Mall, Utkarsh and Phoo, Cheng Perng and Liu, Meilin Kelsey and Vondrick, Carl and Hariharan, Bharath and Bala, Kavita},
booktitle={ICLR},
year={2024}}

Tracking Everything Everywhere All at Once
Qianqian Wang, Yen-Yu Chang, Ruojin Cai, Zhengqi Li, Bharath Hariharan, Aleksander Holynski, Noah Snavely
In ICCV 2023 (Best Student Paper)
paper


@inproceedings{Wang2023Tracking,
title = {Tracking Everything Everywhere All at Once},
author = {Qianqian Wang and Yen-Yu Chang and Ruojin Cai and Zhengqi Li and Bharath Hariharan and Aleksander Holynski and Noah Snavely},
year = {2023},
booktitle = {ICCV}
}

Emergent Correspondence from Image Diffusion
Luming Tang, Menglin Jia, Qianqian Wang, Cheng Phoo, Bharath Hariharan
In NeurIPS 2023.
paper


@inproceedings{Tang2023Emergent,
title = {Emergent Correspondence from Image Diffusion},
author = {Luming Tang and Menglin Jia and Qianqian Wang and Cheng Phoo and Bharath Hariharan},
year = {2023},
booktitle = {NeurIPS}
}

Doppelgangers: Learning to Disambiguate Images of Similar Structures
Ruojin Cai, Joseph Tung, Qianqian Wang, Hadar Averbuch-Elor, Bharath Hariharan, Noah Snavely
In ICCV 2023 (Oral)
paper


@inproceedings{Cai2023Doppelgangers,
title = {Doppelgangers: Learning to Disambiguate Images of Similar Structures},
author = {Ruojin Cai and Joseph Tung and Qianqian Wang and Hadar Averbuch-Elor and Bharath Hariharan and Noah Snavely},
year = {2023},
booktitle = {ICCV}
}

Change-Aware Sampling and Contrastive Learning for Satellite Images
Utkarsh Mall, Bharath Hariharan, Kavita Bala
In CVPR 2023.
paper


@inproceedings{Mall2023Change,
title = {Change-Aware Sampling and Contrastive Learning for Satellite Images},
author = {Utkarsh Mall and Bharath Hariharan and Kavita Bala},
year = {2023},
booktitle = {CVPR}
}

Visual Prompt Tuning
Menglin Jia, Luming Tang, Bor-Chun Chen, Claire Cardie, Serge Belongie, Bharath Hariharan, Ser-Nam Lim
In ECCV 2022.
paper


@inproceedings{Jia2022Visual,
title = {Visual Prompt Tuning},
author = {Menglin Jia and Luming Tang and Bor-Chun Chen and Claire Cardie and Serge Belongie and Bharath Hariharan and Ser-Nam Lim},
year = {2022},
booktitle = {ECCV}
}

Geometry Processing using Neural Fields
Guandao Yang, Serge Belongie, Bharath Hariharan, Vladlen Koltun
In NeurIPS 2021.
paper


@inproceedings{Yang2021Geometry,
title = {Geometry Processing using Neural Fields},
author = {Guandao Yang and Serge Belongie and Bharath Hariharan and Vladlen Koltun},
year = {2021},
booktitle = {NeurIPS}
}