Computer vision researcher & engineer
Mira Purkrabek
Mira or Miroslav?
Mira is short for Miroslav — the name you'll find on my papers. It's pronounced roughly “MEE-rah”.
I work on understanding people, their bodies and the world around them through images and videos.
I'm a PhD researcher at CTU Prague, advised by Jiří Matas, and currently at Qualcomm XR Labs in Amsterdam. My PhD is about human bodies — detecting people, estimating their pose and shape, and understanding their motion. I also explore 3D reconstruction, spatial reasoning and how vision-language models understand people. I like turning these ideas into useful tools, from analysing complex footage to helping personal AI assistants understand our surroundings.
I've also spent eight years coaching floorball. Away from both, I like mountains, speciality coffee and a good epic fantasy book.
A few highlights
Experience
Background & education
CTU in Prague
Visual Recognition Group
Researcher & PhD candidate
2019–present · PhD since 2023
Qualcomm
XR Labs · Amsterdam
Research Intern
2026
University of Tübingen
Real Virtual Humans
Visiting Researcher
2025–2026
Porsche Engineering
Software Developer
2020–2022
It started with floorball footage
My first computer vision projects were about tracking players across cameras. The questions have grown since then: how do we understand a person we can only partly see, or recognise a pose from an unfamiliar angle?
Those questions led to ProbPose at CVPR, on estimating human pose when parts of the body fall outside the image, and BBox-Mask-Pose at ICCV, on separating and understanding people in crowds.BBoxMaskPose v2 at IJCV extends that approach to 3D pose estimation in crowded scenes.
RePoGen received the Best Poster Award at FG 2024. I share the code, models and demos so others can build on them.
Research, put to use
Some of my work happens with people outside computer vision: tools forpolice analysts, infant-development researchers and floorball coaches. Our forensic work received the Czech Ministry of the Interior's award for excellent research results.
At CTU, I also teach and supervise student research. One of those projects, SAM-pose2seg, won Best Student Paper at CVWW 2026. Reviewing is another part of that life; I was an Outstanding Reviewer at CVPR 2025.
Away from the screen
For eight years, a lot of my evenings belonged to Sokol Královské Vinohrady. I started as an assistant with the men's team, coached for a few months in Slovenia during Erasmus, then came back to lead the juniors. Eventually, I became head coach of the men's Superliga team.
We reached the best results in the club's history with a young team, built on shared effort and team spirit. Some of the juniors I coached went on to play for the seniors. Helping people grow has stayed with me in research supervision, too.
A few years on the sidelinesOutside the sports hall, I enjoy mountains, travelling, speciality coffee, psychology and epic fantasy. A favourite is Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen. Coffee even led to a small rating app for our research group.
A conversation about floorballSKV podcast · in CzechMore about meGet in touch
I'm open to applied scientist and research engineer roles in computer vision, and selected consulting work. If you have a project or a question in mind, I'd be happy to hear from you.