Roham Zendehdel Nobari

SLAM 3D vision egocentric perception

  • Computer Vision Team Lead, microagi
  • Graduate Student Researcher, ETH Zurich CVG
  • M.Sc. AI, UZH and special student (CS) at ETH Zurich

Zurich, Switzerland

rohamzn.com · rzendehdel@ethz.ch · github.com/rzninvo · linkedin.com/in/rohamzn

Animated SLAM run: a camera maps landmarks while its pose estimate drifts, then a loop closure is detected and pose-graph optimization pulls the map back into alignment. Animated structure-from-motion turntable: a point map of a small temple turning inside a ring of eight keyframe camera frustums.

About

Portrait of Roham Zendehdel Nobari

I work on SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) for egocentric, first-person video, where hands, people and objects rarely stay still, and on turning that video into 3D data that robots can learn from. At ETH Zurich's Computer Vision and Geometry Group, Mahbod Tajdini and I co-designed and built microSLAM, dense monocular SLAM for dynamic egocentric scenes, as a two-person project supervised by Daniel Barath. It ranks 1st among monocular-only entries on the LaMAria leaderboard and runs in production at microagi (announcement), where I lead the team that turns its output into robot-learning data.

Before microSLAM, I worked on localization and 3D mapping: I co-developed LangLoc (ECCV 2026), which finds where you are in a known indoor scene from a description of what you see, and co-built SpotMap, an updatable 3D scene graph for the Spot robot. I'm doing all this alongside an M.Sc. in AI at the University of Zurich, with computer science courses at ETH Zurich as a special student.

Education

News

  1. Sep 2026

    Shayan Sooratgar and I received the Touché 2026 Award at CLEF 2026 in Jena for the highest event extraction effectiveness in the Causality Extraction task, where we presented our paper Shrome (paper, slides).

  2. Sep 2026

    microagi announced microSLAM, our monocular SLAM for egocentric video (announcement).

  3. Aug 2026

    Became Computer Vision Team Lead at microagi.

  4. Jun 2026

    LangLoc accepted to ECCV 2026 as a main-conference poster, co-first author (arXiv, code).

  5. Apr 2026

    Joined microagi as Perception Engineer (SLAM, contract).

  6. Mar 2026

    Became Graduate Student Researcher at ETH Zurich's CVG, after my LangLoc master project there.

  7. Nov 2025

    Joined the ETH Robotics Club's Humanoid Division, the team behind XALUN, as Robot Learning Engineer.

Publications

  1. LangLoc: “Tell Me What You See”

    S. K. Panwar*, R. Zendehdel Nobari*, S. F. Y. Lau*, A. B. R. Shaik*, M. Günther, M. Pollefeys, D. Barath

    ECCV 2026 · main conference, poster · co-first author (* equal contribution)

    Estimates an observer's 2D position and heading in a known indoor scene from language alone, with no camera: scene-graph retrieval (GATv2 + CLIP), ray-cast visibility scoring, then a Bayesian yes/no dialog.

    LangLoc teaser: a living room overlaid with a scene graph of its objects and the estimated camera position and viewing direction.

  2. Shrome at Touché: Soft-Vote Ensembling and Counter-Causal Augmentation for Causality Extraction

    R. Zendehdel Nobari*, S. Sooratgar*

    CLEF 2026 Working Notes (Touché shared task, CEUR-WS), to appear · talk in Jena, Sep 2026 (* equal contribution)

    Touché 2026 Award at CLEF 2026: highest event extraction effectiveness in the Causality Extraction task

    Reaches granularity-adjusted F1 0.728 on causal candidate extraction in the organizers' final causal-only evaluation (baseline 0.665); counter-causal augmentation adds training sentences that deny a causal link.

Experience

microagi · egocentric data for robot learning

  1. Computer Vision Team Lead Aug 2026 – Present

    • Co-own microSLAM in production with M. Tajdini: the monocular system we built at CVG (below) and its visual-inertial variant.
    • Lead the team turning microSLAM output into robot-learning data: Gaussian splatting, meshes for Isaac Sim, 3D object tracking, 6-DoF object pose estimation, 3D scene flow.

  2. Member of Technical Staff (part-time) Apr 2026 – Aug 2026

    • Co-built microSLAM's tightly coupled visual-inertial variant with M. Tajdini: Ceres optimization of visual and IMU residuals, loop closure via pose-graph optimization, GPU sparse solves via cuDSS.

  3. Perception Engineer (SLAM), contract Apr 2026

ETH Zurich, Computer Vision and Geometry Group (CVG) · supervisor: Daniel Barath

  1. Graduate Student Researcher (part-time) Mar 2026 – Present

    • Co-designed and built microSLAM with Mahbod Tajdini: dense monocular SLAM for dynamic egocentric scenes via motion-aware tracking and instance-level mapping; targeting CVPR 2027.
    • We flagged inflated LaMAria scores, our own included; the maintainers traced them to triangulated control points left free in the scorer's Sim(3) refinement, fixed it and re-scored the affected entries (PR #22).
    • On the re-scored LaMAria leaderboard, microSLAM ranks 1st among monocular-only (no-IMU) entries on all five challenges and 3rd overall on Short, behind only the IMU-aided Aria SLAM and Mighty Camera; three rival monocular entries there are our own reruns.

  2. Master Project Student Jun 2025 – Mar 2026

    • Co-developed LangLoc, text-based indoor localization: 76.7% Top-1 scene-graph retrieval among 10 ScanScribe scenes (+8.1 pp over Text2SGM); its Bayesian yes/no dialog cuts median error from 1.55 to 0.80 m (100 3RScan scenes).
    • Built the LangLoc dataset (13,000+ pose-indexed descriptions over 1,300+ 3RScan scans) with DPP keyframe selection and LLM prompting; wrote most of the public PyTorch code.

ETH Robotics Club, Humanoid Division · team behind XALUN, Switzerland's first student-built humanoid

  1. Robot Learning Engineer (part-time) Nov 2025 – Present

    • Deployed NVIDIA GEAR-SONIC whole-body teleoperation (PICO VR headset) on a Unitree G1 with the team, collecting demonstrations to fine-tune NVIDIA Isaac GR00T N1.7.
    • Added ZED Mini and wrist-camera streaming (Rerun); doubled wrist-camera frame rate with a buffer fix.
    • Co-reconstructed the club's hangar as a real-to-sim mesh; Gaussian-splatting map in progress.

ETH Zurich, Ecosystems and Landscape Evolution Group (D-USYS) · supervisor: Prof. L. Pellissier

  1. Research Assistant (part-time) Apr 2025 – Jun 2026

    • Extended the lab's DADA2 scripts into SeeDNAP, an open-source environmental-DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding pipeline (316 tests).

Projects

Teaching & Service

Awards

Skills

3D vision & SLAM
visual and visual-inertial SLAM, bundle adjustment, pose-graph optimization, visual localization, 3D reconstruction, 3D scene graphs
Machine learning
deep learning, graph neural networks, vision foundation models, imitation learning, reinforcement learning
Robotics
ROS 2, sim-to-real, simulation (Habitat-Sim, Flightmare, Autoware/AWSIM)
Robot platforms
Unitree G1 humanoid, Boston Dynamics Spot, SO-101 arm, quadrotor
Code & tools
Python, C++, CUDA, PyTorch, Ceres, OpenCV, Open3D, Docker, Linux, Git
Languages
English (C2), German (B1), Persian (native), Japanese (elementary)