Felix Heide is the recipient of the 2016 Alain Fournier Ph.D. Dissertation Award. His dissertation, entitled “Structure-aware Computational Imaging”, makes exceptional research contributions to computational imaging and displays, with several major impacts in computer graphics, image processing, computer vision, optics, and photography.
The central theme tackles the use of computations to enable more robust, less expensive, and more portable optical devices. It opens opportunities to new imaging modalities, a temporal dimension of light as it propagates and a per-pixel radial velocity dimension, by resolving inverse problems with approaches from sparse coding and convex optimization. One such theme replaces the trend of more complex lenses by simplifying instead the optical design and correcting computationally the ensuing aberrations with complementary information from multiple color channels. A second theme addresses “light-in-flight” imaging with inexpensive depth cameras, with applications in 3D reconstructions without direct line of sight, imaging in scattering media, and many others. These projects open promising new avenues to approach old and new problems with exciting possibilities.
Felix completed his B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Computer Science at the University of Siegen in 2009 and 2011, respectively. From 2012 to 2016, he completed his Ph.D. program in Computer Science at the University of British Columbia, under the supervision of Dr. Wolfgang Heidrich. He has been an extremely prolific researcher with seven ACM Trans. on Graphics papers, two “oral” papers at CVPR, two in Optics Express, and one in Nature Scientific Reports, all as first author. He has also co-authored almost as many other papers in the same and other related conferences and journals. He participated to five patents, co-founded the company Algolux, and served on program committees of SIGGRAPH Asia, Eurographics, and two CCD workshops of CVPR, as well as chaired the poster program of ICCP.
The “Alain Fournier Memorial Fund” was created to celebrate Alain’s life, to commemorate his accomplishments, and to honour his memory. It rewards an exceptional computer graphics Ph.D. dissertation defended in a Canadian University over the previous year. The winning dissertation is selected through a juried process by a selection committee consisting of accomplished researchers in computer graphics.
For more information about the “Alain Fournier Memorial Fund”, and information about donation, please visit http://graphicsinterface.org/awards/alain-fournier/