He joined Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington in 1997, where he founded and built the Interactive Visual Media group.

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

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

Anandan assumed consecutive posts at Yale University, Sarnoff Corporation and Microsoft Research (MSR).

Many of the techniques such as mosaics and moving object detection (and tracking) that were pioneered in the VSAM program and at Sarnoff are now part of various defense and civilian video surveillance and security systems, and several new companies such as ObjectVideo have been formed that use these technologies.