Sunghoon Im

Sunghoon Im 임성훈

Associate Professor
Graduate School of Culture Technology (GSCT)
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)

PI, Robotics and Vision Lab (RVLab)  ·  Daejeon, South Korea

About

I am an Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Culture Technology (GSCT), KAIST, Daejeon, Korea, since 2026, where I direct the Robotics and Vision Lab (RVLab). Prior to KAIST, I was with DGIST, which I joined as an Assistant Professor in 2019, was appointed Associate Professor in 2023, and named a DGIST Distinguished Professor in 2024; I also served as Director of the DGIST Supercomputing and AI Education and Research Center from 2025 to 2026.

I received the B.S. degree (summa cum laude) in Electronic Engineering from Sogang University, Korea in 2014, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from KAIST, Korea in 2016 and 2019, respectively, both under the supervision of Prof. In So Kweon.

I was a visiting scholar at the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Pittsburgh, US, working with Profs. Martial Hebert and Jean Oh, and a research intern in the Internet Graphics Group at Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA), Beijing, China, working with Dr. Stephen Lin on computational photography. I have also collaborated with researchers at Stanford University and Adobe Research, and served as a technical advisor on multi-modal generative AI and 3D perception in industry.

I am a recipient of the 2025 IPESK Industry-Academia Joint Research Professor Award, the Microsoft Research Asia Fellowship, the Qualcomm Innovation Award, multiple Samsung HumanTech thesis awards, the Young Distinguished Researcher Award from IEIE, the DGIST Visionary Award, and top research achievement awards from KAIST. I was also selected as an outstanding reviewer at CVPR multiple times.

I have served on the program committee of IEEE VR, as a council member of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers (IEIE) and a board member of the Korea Computer Vision Society (KCVS) and the Korea Multimedia Society (KMMS), and as an editor for the IEIE Transactions on Smart Processing and Computing and ICT Express.

Research Interests

Robot Learning

Vision-Language-Action, Diffusion Policy, Reasoning, Navigation, Manipulation

3D Vision

3D Reconstruction, 3D Perception, Visual SLAM, Calibration, LiDAR Perception

Generative AI

Text-driven Image Editing & Generation, Efficient Video Diffusion

Experience

Education