Senior Member of Technical Staff · Lyte AI, Physical AI Labs
I build 3D perception systems that let machines understand the physical world. At Lyte, I work on state estimation and 3D reconstruction for robots.
Before Lyte, I spent 3.5 years at Magic Leap on Gaussian Splatting with integrated semantics for XR. For the last 1.5 years of that I was on assignment at Google, working on camera pose estimation and photorealistic reconstruction for indoor Immersive View in Google Maps. I received my Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota, advised by Volkan Isler, and earlier worked on robotic perception at Samsung AI Center and on photogrammetry at Pix4D.
Camera pose estimation and Gaussian Splatting for photorealistic indoor 3D reconstruction. Built core parts of the pipeline that turns large indoor capture datasets into walkable 3D scenes in Google Maps. To try it, open Dai Due, Austin in the Google Maps app on a phone and tap the Immersive View photo.
Photorealistic 3D Gaussian Splatting reconstructions with integrated semantics, so objects in a scanned room can be selected and manipulated in XR. Includes open-set 3D instance segmentation.
Perception for robots — state estimation and 3D reconstruction.
Camera pose estimation and Gaussian Splatting for indoor Immersive View in Google Maps.
Real-time pose estimation, Gaussian Splatting and open-set 3D instance segmentation for XR.
3D detection, segmentation and reconstruction for robotic grasping.
Advised by Volkan Isler. Novel view synthesis, 3D reconstruction, agricultural robotics.
Shipped 3D point cloud and sky-pixel classification in PIX4Dmapper.
IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2025
@inproceedings{chacko2025lifting,
title = {Lifting by Gaussians: A Simple, Fast and Flexible Method for 3D Instance Segmentation},
author = {Rohan Chacko and Nicolai Häni and Eldar Khaliullin and Lin Sun and Douglas Lee},
booktitle = {IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV)},
year = {2025}
}
Ph.D. thesis, University of Minnesota, 2023
@phdthesis{haeni2023thesis,
title = {Supervised and Unsupervised Methods for Vision-Based Object Detection, Counting and 3D Reconstruction},
author = {Nicolai Häni},
school = {University of Minnesota},
year = {2023}
}
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2023
@inproceedings{chao2023category,
title = {Category-Level Global Camera Pose Estimation with Multi-Hypothesis Point Cloud Correspondences},
author = {Jun-Jee Chao and Selim Engin and Nicolai Häni and Volkan Isler},
booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
year = {2023}
}
arXiv preprint arXiv:2302.12883, 2023
@misc{haeni2023surface,
title = {3D Surface Reconstruction in the Wild by Deforming Shape Priors from Synthetic Data},
author = {Nicolai Häni and Jun-Jee Chao and Volkan Isler},
howpublished = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2302.12883},
year = {2023}
}
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2021
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2020
@inproceedings{haeni2020corn,
title = {Continuous Object Representation Networks: Novel View Synthesis without Target View Supervision},
author = {Nicolai Häni and Selim Engin and Jun-Jee Chao and Volkan Isler},
booktitle = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)},
year = {2020}
}
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2020
Journal of Field Robotics, 2020
@article{haeni2020comparative,
title = {A Comparative Study of Fruit Detection and Counting Methods for Yield Mapping in Apple Orchards},
author = {Nicolai Häni and Pravakar Roy and Volkan Isler},
journal = {Journal of Field Robotics},
year = {2020}
}
arXiv preprint arXiv:1904.02203, 2019
@misc{roy2019semantics,
title = {Semantics-Aware Image to Image Translation and Domain Transfer},
author = {Pravakar Roy and Nicolai Häni and Jun-Jee Chao and Volkan Isler},
howpublished = {arXiv preprint arXiv:1904.02203},
year = {2019}
}
IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2018
Photogrammetric Engineering & Remote Sensing, 2018
@article{becker2018classification,
title = {Classification of Aerial Photogrammetric 3D Point Clouds},
author = {Carlos Becker and Elena Rosinskaya and Nicolai Häni and Emmanuel d'Angelo and Christoph Strecha},
journal = {Photogrammetric Engineering \& Remote Sensing},
year = {2018}
}
IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2016
@inproceedings{haeni2016servoing,
title = {Visual Servoing in Orchard Settings},
author = {Nicolai Häni and Volkan Isler},
booktitle = {IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)},
year = {2016}
}
Journal of Medical Robotics Research, 2016
@article{vanderpoorten2016cognitive,
title = {Cognitive Autonomous Catheters Operating in Dynamic Environments},
author = {Emmanuel Vander Poorten and others},
journal = {Journal of Medical Robotics Research},
year = {2016}
}
Journal of Medical Robotics Research, 2016
@article{devreker2016intuitive,
title = {Intuitive Control Strategies for Teleoperation of Active Catheters in Endovascular Surgery},
author = {Alain Devreker and others},
journal = {Journal of Medical Robotics Research},
year = {2016}
}
Reviewer for CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, WACV, 3DV, ICRA and IROS, and for the journals RA-L, T-RO and JFR.