Luc Van Gool is principal investigator of the the European Research Council (ERC) project "Variation & the City (Varity)" project and professor for computer vision at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich, Switzerland and University of Leuven, Belgium.

His research interests include image understanding and recognition, procedural modeling of cities, texture synthesis, image retrieval, 3D reconstruction, robot vision and cultural heritage.

He is founder and head of the independent Computer Vision Laboratory (CVL) since 2002, part-time professor at ETH since 1998 and part-time full professor at the University of Leuven and head of the VISICS group since 1996. He received a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in electrical engineering in 1991 from the Kotolike Universiteit Leuven.

He is co-founder of numerous spin-offs like Electronics, Outformation, Picot, koala, procedural, etc. He was awarded several awards incl. best paper and video awards (VAST'06, CVPR '07, ACCV'07, ICRA'09, etc) and industrial prizes, incl. an EITC, Henri Ford Conservation, Goldeneye, Innovation Electro Suisse, etc.