Paul Debevec in Beijing

7 September 2010, 9-11 am

Beiguo Theater, Beijing Normal University

Attendance: 300

Abstract

Paul Debevec

Paul Debevec is Associate Director of Graphics Research at the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies and a Research Associate Professor in USC's Viterbi School of Engineering's Computer Science Department.

His 1996 PhD thesis from the University of California, Berkeley presented Façade, an image-based modeling and rendering system for creating photoreal architectural models from photographs. Using Façade, he led creation of virtual cinematography of the Berkeley campus for his SIGGRAPH 97 film "The Campanile Movie". Techniques from that film were subsequently used to create virtual backgrounds for "bullet-time" shots in
"The Matrix".

He pioneered high-dynamic-range (HDR) image-based lighting techniques in his animations "Rendering with Natural Light", "Fiat Lux", and "The Parthenon", and he led the design of HDR Shop, the first HDR image editing program. At ICT, Debevec has led development of a series of Light Stage devices for digitizing the shape and appearance of human faces, for which he received a Scientific and Engineering Academy Award in 2010 with Tim Hawkins, John Monos, and Mark Sagar.

The recipient of ACM SIGGRAPH's first Significant New Researcher Award in 2001, he co-authored the 2005 book High Dynamic Range Imaging and chaired the SIGGRAPH 2007 Computer Animation Festival. He is a member of the ACM SIGGRAPH Executive Committee, the Visual Effects Society, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.