Ralf Schäfer received his Dipl.-Ing. and Dr.-Ing. degrees both in electrical engineering from the Technical Unversity of Berlin in 1977 and 1984 respectiveley. In October 1977 he joined the Heinrich-Hertz-Institut (HHI) in Berlin. Since 1989 he is head of the Image Processing Department. In the department he is responsible for about 70 researchers and technicians, about 50 students and currently 25 R&D projects.

He participated in several European research activities like COST, EUREKA, RACE, ACTS, ESPRIT, IST and ICT and for a long period he was member of the Technical Module of the European DVB-project (TM-DVB), where he was chairing the Task Force on "Digital Terrestrial Television - System Aspects, which specified the DVB-T standard. He coordinated the German joint research projects HDTV-T, MINT and GigaMedia and INVINET. Currently he is coordinating the Core Technology Cluster of the THESEUS project, which is a German initiative on the Internet of Services and semantic technologies.

Ralf Schäfer is member of the German „Society for Information Technology“ (ITG), where he is chairman of the experts group „Digital Coding“ (FG 3.2). Furthermore he is member of the German „Society for Television and Motion Picture Technology“ (FKTG), where he belongs to the URTEL Award Committee.

In 1986 he received the paper award of the ITG and in 2000 the Richard Theile Medal of the FKTG.

He was co-founder of the two spin-off companies 2SK Media Technologies and MikroM GmbH.