Seminar • Computer Graphics • Physical Light Transport

Please note: This seminar will take place in DC 1304 and virtually over Zoom.

Shlomi Steinberg, PhD candidate
University of California, Santa Barbara

Rendering and path-tracing techniques power most of the complex computer-generated content we see in films and movies, visualizations and even video games. However, these techniques are strictly confined to ray optics, while many applications often require simulating the interference and diffraction phenomena, that arise from the wave nature of light.

The purpose of this work is to generalize classical path-tracing techniques to wave optics. I introduce physical light transport (PLT), a framework which represents the wave nature of light globally in a scene, and is consistent with Maxwell’s electromagnetism. I will show how a wave-optical system can be sampled using generalized rays, i.e., local and linear classical-like point queries of the wave-optical system. These generalized rays enable the application of essentially arbitrary sampling methods, but do so under rigorous wave optics. Therefore, this work serves as a link between computer graphics’ path tracing and computational optics methods, and enables wave-optical simulations at large scales and complex real-life scenes.

Bio: Shlomi Steinberg is a 4th year Ph.D. student at the University of California Santa Barbara, where his research resides at the intersection of rendering and computational optics. He received his M.Sc. degree in mathematics and computer science from Weizmann Institute of Science. His M.Sc. research centred on efficient execution and distribution of formally-verifiable software paradigms. Previously, Shlomi was a rendering engineer working on CRYENGINE, a leading rendering engine, and HUNT, a successful (triple-A) video game.

To attend this seminar in person, please go to DC 1304. You can also attend virtually using Zoom at https://uwaterloo.zoom.us/j/97173036363.

For those attending virtually: The passcode will be provided by email on Friday before the seminar as well as on the morning of the seminar.