Roberto Javier López-Sastre

Full Professor, University of Alcalá 

Office S-342, Polytechnic School
University of Alcalá
Campus Universitario, A2 Km 33.600
28805, Alcalá de Henares (SPAIN)
Email: robertoj.lopez@uah.es
Tlf: (+34) 91 885 6720
Fax: (+34) 91 885 6699

Teaching 2025-2026:

ABOUT ME

Roberto J. López-Sastre is Full Professor at the University of Alcalá (Spain). His research interests lie at the intersection of Robotics, Computer Vision, and Machine Learning, with particular emphasis on the problem visual semantic navigation. He has authored more than 50 high-impact publications -including CVPR, ECCV, BMVC, IROS-, 4 patents, and led 8 national highly-competitive projects as Principal Investigator. He received a Master of Electrical Engineering from the University of Alcalá, Spain in 2005. He works at GRAM research group within the Department of Signal Theory and Communications, where he defended his PhD in Electrical Engineering on may 18, 2010, entitled "Visual Vocabularies for Category-Level Object Recognition". In 2008, he spent 6 months in lovely Leuven, working with Tinne Tuytelaars and the VISICS-PSI research group. Summer 2010, he visited Silvio Savarese's group at University of Michigan.

Research interests

In reverse chronological order: semantic visual navigation, AI applied to astrophysics, offline-RL, meta-learning, unsupervised learning, activity recognition, object category pose estimation, semantic visual vocabularies, category-level object recognition, traffic signs recognition/detection.

Group

PhD Students:

Postdocs: Visitors:
  • Sergio Hernández-García (2022, PhD student from King Juan Carlos University)
  • Nadjia Khatir (2017, PhD student from University of Oran)
Master's and Undergraduate Students:
  • Walfrido González Molina (Undergraduate student)
  • Alexis Bañuls González (Master student)
  • Bilel Taref (Master student)
Alumni:

Community duties & Awards

Program committee member / reviewer for the following conferences: Awards:
Reviewer for journals: IEEE TPAMI, CVIU, IEEE TIP, Robotics and Autonomous Systems , IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics, IEEE SPL, PRL, IEEE TCSVT, PR, JRTIP, and IEEE ITS.

Selected Publications

Preprints


SEMNAV: A Semantic Segmentation-Driven Approach to Visual Semantic Navigation

R. Flor-Rodríguez, C. Gutiérrez-Álvarez, F. J. Acevedo-Rodríguez, S. Lafuente-Arroyo, R. J. López-Sastre.

ArXiv, 2025. PDF Code


Realistic Continual Learning Approach using Pre-trained Models

N. Nasri, C. Gutiérrez-Álvarez, S. Lafuente-Arroyo, S. Maldonado-Bascón, R. J. López-Sastre.

ArXiv, 2024. PDF


2026


MetaNav: A Bio-Inspired Meta-Imitation Learning Framework for Robotic Visual Semantic Navigation

C. Gutiérrez-Álvarez, R. Flor-Rodríguez-Rabadán, S. Lafuente-Arroyo, S. Maldonado-Bascón, R. J. López-Sastre.

IWINAC, 2026. PDF


2025


Live Video Captioning

E. Blanco-Fernández, C. Gutiérrez-Álvarez, N. Nasri, S. Maldonado-Bascón, R. J. López-Sastre.

Multimedia Tools and Applications, 2025. PDF Code


Visual Semantic Navigation with Real Robots

C. Gutiérrez-Álvarez, P. Ríos-Navarro, R. Flor-Rodríguez, F. J. Acevedo-Rodríguez, R. J. López-Sastre.

Applied Intelligence, 2025. PDF Code Video


Unveiling the power of uncertainty: A journey into Bayesian Neural Networks for stellar dating

V. Tamames Rodero, A. Moya Bedón, L. M. Sarro Baro, R. J. López-Sastre.

Astronomy and Computing, 2025. PDF


2023


Towards Clear Evaluation of Robotic Visual Semantic Navigation

C. Gutiérrez-Álvarez, S. Hernandez-García, N. Nasri, A. Cuesta-Infante, R. J. López-Sastre.

ICARA, 2023. PDF Code


2022


Assistive Robot with an AI-Based Application for the Reinforcement of Activities of Daily Living: Technical Validation with Users Affected by Neurodevelopmental Disorders

N. Nasri, R. J. López-Sastre, S. Pacheco-da-Costa, I. Fernández-Munilla, C. Gutiérrez-Álvarez, T. Pousada-Garcı́a, F. J. Acevedo-Rodríguez, S. Maldonado-Bascón,.

Applied Sciences, 2022. PDF


Stellar mass and radius estimation using artificial intelligence

A. Moya and R. J. López-Sastre.

Astronomy & Astrophysics, 2022. PDF Code


2021


Live Video Action Recognition from Unsupervised Action Proposals

R. J. López-Sastre, M. Baptista-Ríos, F. J. Acevedo-Rodríguez, P. Martín-Martín, S. Maldonado-Bascón.

17th International Conference on Machine Vision Applications (MVA), 2021. PDF


AI for dating stars: a benchmarking study for gyrochronology

A. Moya, J. Recio-Martínez and R. J. López-Sastre.

1st Workshop on AI for Space, CVPR, 2021. PDF Supplementary Code


2020


Rethinking Online Action Detection in Untrimmed Videos: A Novel Online Evaluation Protocol

M. Baptista-Ríos, R. J. López-Sastre, F. Caba Heilbron, Jan van Gemert, F. J. Acevedo-Rodríguez, S. Maldonado-Bascón.

IEEE Access, 2020. PDF Code


Unsupervised Action Proposals Using Support Vector Classifiers for Online Video Processing

M. Baptista-Ríos, R. J. López-Sastre, F. J. Acevedo-Rodríguez, P. Martín-Martín, S. Maldonado-Bascón.

Sensors, 2020. PDF Code


Learning to Learn Face-PAD: a lifelong learning approach

D. Pérez-Cabo, D. Jiménez-Cabello, A. Costa-Pazo, R. J. López-Sastre..

IJCB, 2020. PDF Code


2019


Deep Anomaly Detection for Generalized Face Anti-Spoofing

D. Pérez-Cabo, D. Jiménez-Cabello, A. Costa-Pazo, R. J. López-Sastre.

Chalearn Looking at People series Face Spoofing Attack Workshop and Challenge, CVPR 2019. PDF


Generalized Presentation Attack Detection: a face anti-spoofing evaluation proposal

A. Costa-Pazo, D. Jiménez-Cabello, E. Vázquez-Fernández, J. L. Alba-Castro, R. J. López-Sastre.

International Conference on Biometrics (ICB) 2019. PDF Code


Combining Online Clustering and Rank Pooling Dynamics for Action Proposals

Nadjia Khatir, Roberto J. López-Sastre, Marcos Baptista-Ríos, Safia Nait-Bahloul, Francisco Javier Acevedo-Rodríguez.

IBPRIA 2019 PDF


Collision anticipation via deep reinforcement learning for visual navigation

E. Gutiérrez-Maestro, R. J. López-Sastre, S. Maldonado-Bascón.

IBPRIA 2019 PDF


Learning to Exploit the Prior Network Knowledge for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

C. Redondo-Cabrera, M. Baptista-Ríos, R. J. López-Sastre.

IEEE Transactions on Image Processing 2019 PDF Code


Answering Visual-Relational Queries in Web-Extracted Knowledge Graphs

D. Oñoro-Rubio, M. Niepert, A. García-Durán, R. González, R. J. López-Sastre.

AKBC 2019 PDF Code


Unsupervised learning from videos using temporal coherency deep networks

C. Redondo-Cabrera and R. J. López-Sastre.

Computer Vision and Image Understanding 2019. PDF Code


2018


The challenge of simultaneous object detection and pose estimation: a comparative study

D. Oñoro-Rubio, R. J. López-Sastre, C. Redondo-Cabrera, P. Gil-Jiménez.

Image and Vision Computing 2018. PDF Code


In pixels we trust: From Pixel Labeling to Object Localization and Scene Categorization

C. Herránz-Perdigureo, C. Redondo-Cabrera and R. J. López-Sastre.

IROS, 2018. PDF Code Video


Learning Short-Cut Connections for Object Counting

D. Oñoro-Rubio, M. Niepert, R. J. López-Sastre.

BMVC, 2018 PDF


ISA^2: Intelligent Speed Adaptation from Appearance

C. Herránz-Perdigureo and R. J. López-Sastre.

IROS 2018 Workshop, 10th Planning, Perception and Navigation for Intelligent Vehicles (PPNIV'18). PDF ISA^2 Dataset


2016


Pose Estimation Errors, the Ultimate Diagnosis

C. Redondo-Cabrera, R. J. López-Sastre, Y. Xiang , T. Tuytelaars, S. Savarese.

ECCV, 2016. PDF Code Supplementary


Towards perspective-free object counting with deep learning

D. Oñoro-Rubio and R. J. López-Sastre.

ECCV, 2016. PDF Code Video


Unsupervised Robust Feature-based Partition Ensembling to Discover Categories

R. J. López-Sastre.

CVPR Workshops, Robust Features for Computer Vision, 2016. PDF Code Video


2015


Because better detections are still possible: Multi-aspect Object Detection with Boosted Hough Forest

C. Redondo-Cabrera, R. J. López-Sastre.

BMVC 2015. PDF Supplementary Code


Extremely Overlapping Vehicle Counting

R. Guerrero-Gómez-Olmedo, B. Torre-Jimenez, R. J. López-Sastre, S. Maldonado-Bascón and Daniel Oñoro-Rubio.

IbPRIA 2015. PDF TRANCOS Dataset


Fast Head Pose Estimation for Human-Computer Interaction

M. García-Montero, C. Redondo-Cabrera, R. López-Sastre and Tinne Tuytelaars.

IbPRIA 2015. PDF Code Video


Structured Output Prediction with Hierarchical Loss Functions for Seafloor Imagery Taxonomic Categorization.

N. Nourani-Vatani, R. López-Sastre and S. Williams.

IbPRIA 2015. PDF Code Video


2014


Recognizing in the Depth: Selective 3D Spatial Pyramid Matching Kernel for Object and Scene Categorization

C. Redondo-Cabrera, R. J. López-Sastre, J. Acevedo-Rodríguez, S. Maldonado-Bascon.

Image and Vision Computing 2014. PDF Project page


All together now: Simultaneous Object Detection and Continuous Pose Estimation using a Hough Forest with Probabilistic Locally Enhanced Voting

C. Redondo-Cabrera, R. J. López-Sastre, T. Tuytelaars.

BMVC 2014. PDF Project page


2013


Evaluating 3D spatial pyramids for classifying 3D shapes

R. J. López-Sastre, A. García-Fuertes, C. Redondo-Cabrera, F. J. Acevedo-Rodríguez, S. Maldonado-Bascón.

Computers & Graphics 2013. PDF Project page - Executable Paper


Vehicle Tracking by Simultaneous Detection and Viewpoint Estimation

R. Guerrero-Gómez-Olmedo, R. J. López-Sastre, S. Maldonado-Bascón, A. Fernández-Caballero.

IWINAC 2013. PDF GRAM RTM Dataset


Heterogeneous Visual Codebook Integration via Consensus Clustering for Visual Categorization

R. J. López-Sastre, J. Renes-Olalla, P. Gil-Jiménez, S. Maldonado-Bascón, S. Lafuente-Arroyo.

IEEE TCSVT 2013. PDF Project page


2012


SURFing the Point Clouds: Selective 3D Spatial Pyramids for Category-level Object Recognition

C. Redondo-Cabrera, R. J. López-Sastre, F.J. Acevedo-Rodríguez, S. Maldonado-Bascón.

IEEE CVPR 2012. PDF Project page


2011


Deformable Part Models Revisited: A Performance Evaluation for Object Category Pose Estimation

R. J. López-Sastre, T. Tuytelaars, S. Savarese.

IEEE ICCV 2011, 1st IEEE Workshop on Challenges and Opportunities in Robot Perception. PDF Project page


Fast Reciprocal Nearest Neighbors Clustering

R. J. López-Sastre, D. Oñoro-RUbio, P. Gil-Jiménez, S. Maldonado-Bascón.

Signal Processing. PDF Code


Towards a more discriminative and semantic visual vocabulary

R. J. López-Sastre, T. Tuytelaars, J. Acevedo-Rodríguez, S. Maldonado-Bascón.

Computer Vision and Image Understanding. PDF Code


Visual Word Aggregation

R. J. López-Sastre, J. Renes-Olalla, P. Gil-Jiménez, S. Maldonado-Bascón.

ibPRIA2011. PDF


2010


Visual Vocabularies for Category-Level Object Recognition

R. J. López-Sastre

Ph.D. Thesis. PDF


2009


Class Representative Visual Words for Category-level Object Recognition

R. J. López-Sastre, T. Tuytelaars and S. Maldonado-Bascón.

ibPRIA2009. PDF


2008


Fundaments in luminance and retroreflectivity measurements of vertical traffic signs using a color digital camera

P. Siegmann, R. J. López-Sastre, P. Gil-Jiménez, S. Lafuente-Arroyo, S. Maldonado-Bascón.

IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement. PDF


2007


Computer Algebra Algorithms Applied to Computer Vision in a Parking Management System

R. J. López-Sastre, P. Gil-Jiménez, F.J. Acevedo, S. Maldonado.

IEEE ISIE 2007. PDF


Road-sign Detection and recognition based on support vector machines

S. Maldonado-Bascón, S. Lafuente-Arroyo, P. Gil-Jiménez, H. Gómez-Moreno and F. López-Ferreras.

IEEE trans. on Intelligent transportation systems. PDF


2006


An Approach to the Recognition of Information Traffic Sign Based on 2-D Homography and SVMs

A. Vázquez-Reina, R. J. López-Sastre, P. Siegmann, S. Lafuente-Arroyo and H. Gómez-Moreno.

Proceedings of Advanced Concepts for Intelligent Vision Systems 2006. PDF


Adaptive Traffic Road Sign Panels Text Extraction

A. Vázquez-Reina, R. J. López-Sastre, S. Lafuente-Arroyo and P. Gil-Jiménez.

ISPRA 2006. PDF


2005


Recognition of Mandatory Traffic Signs using the Hausdorff Distance

R. J. López-Sastre, S. Lafuente-Arroyo, P. Siegmann, P. Gil-Jiménez, A. Vázquez-Reina.

ISCGAV 2005. PDF


Teaching

Asignaturas/Courses


24/25

23/24

22/23

21/22

20/21

19/20

18/19

17/18

16/17

15/16

14/15

13/14

12/13

11/12

10/11

09/10

08/09

07/08

06/07