Or carmakers could utilise the technology to make autonomous cars safer and more reactive to their immediate environment. Cremers' trailblazing research into mathematical image pro-cessing and pattern recognition earned him the 2016 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize – Germany's most esteemed award in the sciences. His question: How can we use a camera to capture and "recover" the 3D world and reconstruct it in real time? It might lie in something called "Direct Image Alignment," which is a core component of his current research into realising the 3D world in images – faster, with greater accuracy and with more robustness.