Since 1985, he has been in charge of several R&D; projects in the areas of image processing, database systems, and system design/integration, involving simulation and animation. He has been the head of the Simulation and Animation Department at FhG- IGD since 1987 and head of the Visualization Division since 1989. In 1991, he has served as the first Associate Manager of the Fraunhofer Computer Graphics Research Group (USA), located in Gales Ferry, Connecticut. From 1989 to June 1994 he was Convenor of the ISO/IEC JTC1/SC24 Working Group 7 which prepared the ISO/IEC Standards 12087 and 12089 on Processing and Interchange (IPI).
His major research interests and experience are in the areas of simulation and animation systems, image processing, the integration of video and graphics, and the integration of these pieces in multimedia & hypermedia systems. Since 1992 he has been active in WWW developments by leading several different research projects in this area.
Currently, Detlef Krömker is the Head of the Animation and HD-Image Communication Department of the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics. He chairs both the GI (Gesellschaft für Informatik) special interest group on simulation and animation (GI-FG 4.1.4), and the DIN Group on imaging.