People

Dr. Yogesh S. Rawat is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the Center for Research in Computer Vision (CRCV) at the University of Central Florida. His research sits at the intersection of computer vision, deep learning, and multimodal AI, with a particular focus on video understanding, human activity recognition, biometrics, and building visual perception systems that are robust and label-efficient.

He received his PhD in Computer Science from the School of Computing, National University of Singapore (2012–2017), advised by Mohan Kankanhalli, and completed his postdoctoral training at CRCV, UCF (2017–2019) under Mubarak Shah. Before that, he spent several years as a Senior Member of Technical Staff at Mentor Graphics. He earned his BTech in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (BHU), Varanasi, in 2009.

Dr. Rawat’s research on activity-based biometrics introduced novel methods for identifying people from how they move, supported by IARPA’s BRIAR program and NSF ART funding. He has led or co-led research funding from agencies including NSF, IARPA, DARPA, ARO, and Microsoft Research, spanning programs such as BRIAR, DIVA, WRIVA, RED and KAIROS. He was awarded Reach for the Stars award in 2025 at UCF.

He serves as Associate Editor for Pattern Recognition, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, and Machine Vision and Applications, and has served as Area Chair for CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NeurIPS, AAAI, WACV, ACM Multimedia, and BMVC. He was named an Outstanding Area Chair at CVPR 2026, one of the top three Associate Editors of IEEE-TCSVT in both 2023 and 2025, and was elevated to Senior Member, IEEE, in 2024. He is deeply committed to mentoring the next generation of researchers, with a particular passion for involving undergraduate and underrepresented students in research.

Hobbies

Table Tennis — He has been playing table tennis since his childhood, when he was fortunate to be mentored by coach Jyoti Shah who prepared him for state and national level competitions. He represented his state (Uttar Pradesh and later Uttarakhand) in national-level tournaments from 1998–2003, and went on to represent IIT-BHU at the national level (2005 and 2007). He won gold at the IIT-Open Table Tennis tournament at IIT-BHU (January 2006) and represented BHU at the East Zone tournament at Tezpur University (March 2006). He served as captain of the IIT-BHU table tennis team for two consecutive years (2007–2009), and later won gold in singles and bronze in mixed doubles at OlymNUS during his PhD at NUS (March 2014).

Painting and other Sports — A creative outlet outside the lab; he enjoy painting in his free time. He also like playing football and badminton.