Abstract:  Imaging systems typically accumulate photons that, as they travel from a light source to a camera, follow multiple different paths and interact with several scene objects. This multi-path accumulation process confounds the information that is available in captured images about the scene, such as geometry and material properties. Computational light transport techniques help overcome this multi-path confounding problem, by enabling imaging systems to selectively accumulate only photons that are informative for any given imaging task. Unfortunately, and despite a proliferation of such techniques in the last two decades, they are constrained to operate only under macroscopic settings. This places them out of reach for critical applications requiring microscopic resolutions.

In this talk, I will go over recent progress towards overcoming these limitations, by developing new interferometric imaging techniques for computational light transport. I will show developments on theory, algorithms, and hardware that enable new interferometric imaging systems with the full range of computational light transport capabilities. I will explain how these systems help overcome constraints traditionally associated with interferometric imaging, such as the need to operate in highly controlled lab environments, under very long acquisition times, and using specialized light sources. Lastly, I will show results related to applications such as medical imaging, industrial fabrication, and inspection of critical parts.

Speaker Biography:  Ioannis Gkioulekas is an Assistant Professor at the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). He is a Sloan Research Fellow, and a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award and the Best Paper Award at CVPR 2019. He has PhD and MS degrees from Harvard University, where he was advised by Todd Zickler, and a Diploma from the National Technical University of Athens, where he was advised by Petros Maragos. His works broadly on computer vision, computer graphics, and computational imaging, with a focus on problems including non-line-of-sight imaging, tissue imaging, interferometric imaging systems, physically based rendering, and differentiable rendering.