News Release
Computer Graphics Pioneer Ravi Ramamoorthi Earns His Second Frontiers of Science Award in Two Years
University of California San Diego computer scientist Ravi Ramamoorthi earned a Frontiers of Science Award – his second in two years – at the 2024 International Congress of Basic Science (ICBS) held in Beijing this month. The awards recognize groundbreaking papers published in the last 10 years.
Ramamoorthi, who was previously honored at the 2023 ICBS conference for his groundbreaking paper on Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) technology, was recognized this year in the graphics and geometric computing category for advancing view synthesis for virtual reality.
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Ramamoorthi, the director of the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering’s Center for Visual Computing (VisComp), and his co-authors from UC Berkeley, Texas A&M University, and Fyusion, earned the Frontiers of Science Award for their paper, Local Light Field Fusion: Practical View Synthesis with Prescriptive Sampling Guidelines. The research, originally presented at SIGGRAPH 2019 and published in the ACM Transactions on Graphics, presented a deep learning solution for capturing and rendering novel views of complex real-world scenes for virtual exploration.
At that time, approaches to scene rendering were hampered by dense view sampling and insufficient user guidance. The key contribution of the method is a novel theoretical framework to predict the required sampling for capturing views of a scene, providing a prescription for where new images should be taken, and reducing the number of views needed by a factor of up to 4000, to only 20-50 images. Ramamoorthi and his colleagues introduced a novel algorithm for view synthesis that expands each sampled view into a local light field via a multiplane image scene representation. It then renders novel views by blending adjacent local light fields.
The team’s simple and fast computations enabled high-quality view interpolation of real-world scenes in real-time. An augmented reality smartphone app they developed guides users to capture input images of a scene, and enables real-time virtual exploration on desktop and mobile platforms.
Ramamoorthi’s research from his Ph.D. thesis in 2001 was also selected as one of 11 rendering papers for SIGGRAPH’s 50th anniversary compilation of the Seminal Graphics Papers: Pushing the Boundaries, Volume 2. In 2019, he was inducted into ACM SIGGRAPH Academy for his theoretical work in mathematical representations of visual appearance.
ICBS is an annual event bringing together leading experts from across the globe to encourage scholarship at the frontiers of basic science – in Mathematics, Theoretical Physics, and Theoretical Computer and Information Science – and to recognize top research published in the last ten years. This year, the conference presented 26 awards in computer science, including three in computer graphics.
Release by Kimberley Clementi
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