Differentiable Simulation of Light

Wenzel Jakob

(EPFL)


Please LOG IN to view the video.

Date: November 10, 2021

Description:

Inverse problems involving light abound throughout many scientific disciplines. Typically, a set of images captured by an instrument must be mathematically processed to reveal some property of our physical reality. This talk will provide an introduction and overview of the emerging field of differentiable physically based rendering, which has the potential of substantially improving the accuracy of such calculations.
Methods in this area propagate derivative information through physical light simulations to solve optimization problems. While still very much a work in progress, advances in the last years have led to increasingly efficient and numerically robust methods that can begin to tackle interesting real-world problems. I will give an overview of recent progress and open problems.

Further Information:

Wenzel’s research revolves around inverse graphics, material appearance modelling and physically based rendering algorithms. He is interested in solving real-world problems using invertible simulations and developing algorithms and systems to do so at scale. Wenzel has received the ACM SIGGRAPH Significant Researcher award, the Eurographics Young Researcher Award, and an ERC Starting Grant. His group develops the Mitsuba renderer, a research-oriented rendering system, and he has created widely used open-source frameworks, including pybind11, Instant Meshes (SGP Software Award recipient), NanoGUI, and Enoki.




Created: Wednesday, November 10th, 2021