The main observation was that spatial discontinuities in image motion and violations of the standard brightness constancy assumption could be treated as outliers.

[2] The method was used to compute optical flow for the painterly effects in What Dreams May Come and for registering 3D face scans in The Matrix Reloaded.

His work with David Fleet on the "Probabilistic Detection and Tracking of Motion Boundaries" won honorable mention for the Marr Prize at ICCV'99.

[5] Black's work with Stefan Roth "On the spatial statistics of optical flow" received honorable mention for the Marr Prize at ICCV 2005.

[6] His work with Deqing Sun and Stefan Roth on the "Secrets of Optical Flow" was awarded the 2020 Longuet- Higgins Prize.

The prize is given annually by the IEEE Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI) Technical Committee for "Contributions in Computer Vision that Have Withstood the Test of Time."

The "secrets" paper helped establish the state of the art in the field and led to the widely used Classic+NL flow algorithm.

This was facilitated by several papers that connected robust penalty functions to classical "line processes" used in Markov Random Fields (MRFs) at the time.

Black and Rangarajan[7] characterized the formal properties of robust functions that have an equivalent line-process form and provided a process to convert between these formulations (known now as "Black-Rangarajan Duality"[8]).

Black and colleagues applied these ideas to image denoising,[9] anisotropic diffusion,[10] and principal-component analysis (PCA).

With Hedvig Sidenbladh and David Fleet, he introduced the use of particle filtering for tracking 3D articulated human motion.

[31][32] SMPL is widely used in both academia and industry and was one of the core technologies licensed by Body Labs Inc. Loper and Black popularized "differentiable rendering",[33] which has become an important component of self-supervised training of neural networks for problems like facial analysis.

1992–1993: Black did post-doctoral work at the University of Toronto as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science (Contractually Limited Term Appointment).

2011–present: In 2011, Black became a Scientific Member of the Max Planck Society and one of the founding directors of the new MPI for Intelligent Systems.

In 2015, he proposed an initiative that has since become Cyber Valley, which aims to make the Stuttgart-Tübingen region of Germany a world leader in AI research and applications.