Black is a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. He is a recipient of the PAMI Distinguished Researcher Award and all three major test-of-time awards in the field, including the 2022 and 2010 Koenderink Prize (ECCV), the 2013 Helmholtz Prize (ICCV), and the 2020 Longuet-Higgins Prize (CVPR). His work has won several paper awards including the IEEE Computer Society Outstanding Paper Award (CVPR'91). His work received Honorable Mention for the Marr Prize in 1999 and 2005. His early work on optical flow has been widely used in Hollywood films including for the Academy-Award-winning effects in “What Dreams May Come” and “The Matrix Reloaded.” He has contributed to several influential datasets including the Middlebury Flow dataset, HumanEva, and the Sintel dataset. Black has coauthored over 300 peer-reviewed scientific publications.

He is also active in commercializing scientific results, is an inventor on 10 issued patents, and has advised multiple startups. He uniquely combines computer vision, graphics, and machine learning to solve problems in the clothing industry. In 2013, he co-founded Body Labs Inc., which used computer vision, machine learning, and graphics technology licensed from his lab to commercialize "the body as a digital platform." Body Labs was acquired by Amazon in 2017. Black is a co-founder and Chief Scientist of Meshcapade GmbH, which makes an avatar-as-a-service platform.

Black's research interests in computer vision include optical flow estimation, 3D shape models, human shape and motion analysis, robust statistical methods, and probabilistic models of the visual world. In computational neuroscience his work focuses on probabilistic models of the neural code and applications of neural decoding in neural prosthetics.