News Release
UC San Diego Computer Graphics Grad Student Wins International Award
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| Tiancheng (Kevin) Sun |
San Diego, CA, June 15, 2018 -- UC San Diego 1st year computer science graduate student Tiancheng (Kevin) Sun has won first place in the undergraduate category of the 2018 ACM Student Research Competition. Tiancheng Sun is being recognized for work entitled “Attribute-preserving gamut mapping of measured BRDFs.” This is ACM’s highest honor for undergraduate computer science research. He will be the youngest recipient at the ACM awards banquet in June in San Francisco, which honors all ACM award winners (and ACM Fellows) at various career stages (up to the Turing award).
The research is aimed at making real-world materials such are marble appear more realistic when printed on flat surfaces using current printing technology.
At the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering, Tiancheng Sun has joined the research group of Computer Science and Engineering professor Ravi Ramamoorthi, who directs the UC San Diego Center for Visual Computing.
Below is the abstract the winning project which Tiancheng Sun, then an undergraduate at Tsinghua University, developed as a visiting student at Universidad de Zaragoza, in collaboration with Ana Serrano, Diego Gutierrez and Belen Masia.
Abstract
Reproducing the appearance of real-world materials using current printing technology is problematic. The reduced number of inks available define the printer’s limited gamut, creating distortions in the printed appearance that are hard to control. Gamut mapping refers to the process of bringing an outof-gamut material appearance into the printer’s gamut, while minimizing such distortions as much as possible. We present a novel two-step gamut mapping algorithm that allows users to specify which perceptual attribute of the original material they want to preserve (such as brightness, or roughness). In the first step, we work in the low-dimensional intuitive appearance space recently proposed by Serrano et al. [2016], and adjust achromatic reflectance via an objective function that strives to preserve certain attributes. From such intermediate representation, we then perform an image-based optimization including color information, to bring the BRDF into gamut. We show, both objectively and through a user study, how our method yields superior results compared to the state of the art, with the additional advantage that the user can specify which visual attributes need to be preserved.
ACM Student Research Competition
The ACM Student Research Competition, sponsored by Microsoft, is an internationally recognized venue enabling undergraduate and graduate students to experience the research world, share research results and exchange ideas, rub shoulders with academic and industry luminaries, understand the practical applications of their research and gain recognition.
Media Contacts
Daniel Kane
Jacobs School of Engineering
858-534-3262
dbkane@ucsd.edu