Giuseppe Claudio Guarnera, PhD
Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Computer Science, University of York
Chief Scientific Officer, Lumirithmic
Giuseppe Claudio (Claudio) Guarnera is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Computer Science at the University of York. His research is on the measurement, modelling and rendering of material and facial appearance, connecting computer graphics with optical measurement, computer vision, colour science and human perception. Recent work ranges from spectral and polarimetric capture to learned spectral representations for rendering and physically grounded generative models.
Claudio is also Chief Scientific Officer at Lumirithmic, an Imperial College London spin-out in 3D appearance capture, where he leads the company’s scientific direction and its R&D on facial and material appearance capture and neural rendering. Several of his methods are in commercial use, including a granted patent family on spectral skin capture.
Claudio received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Catania, carrying out part of his doctoral research in the Graphics Lab of the USC Institute for Creative Technologies with Abhijeet Ghosh and Paul Debevec. He then held postdoctoral positions at the University of Milano-Bicocca, Loughborough University and NTNU in Norway. At NTNU he secured a Young Research Talents grant from the Research Council of Norway for SPECTRASKIN, a project on spectral skin modelling and rendering that he led as Principal Investigator until 2024, and was selected for the university's Outstanding Academic Fellows Programme. Alongside his academic posts he worked as a Senior Research Consultant on fabric appearance acquisition with KiSP Inc, Toronto. He joined the University of York in 2019.
Research interests
Appearance acquisition: materials, human skin and faces
Spectral and polarimetric imaging
Spectral, neural and physically based rendering
Colour science and colour constancy
Applied perception and virtual reality
Shape from polarisation
Physically grounded generative models
News
2026 – “Spectral Rendering Without a Spectral Renderer: Learned Spectral Codes for RGB Pipelines”, with PhD student Jiaqi Yu, accepted to ACM Transactions on Graphics and SIGGRAPH Asia 2026 [arXiv].
2026 – General Chair of CVMP 2026, London.
July 2026 – “Physics-Guided Motion Loss for Video Generation Model” presented at ICML 2026 [arXiv].
July 2026 – “Spectral Image Rendering of Fluorescent Objects Using a Conventional Renderer”, with Shoji Tominaga, published in IEEE TVCG [DOI].
2026 – “PBR-Inspired Controllable Diffusion for Image Generation” at Eurographics 2026 (Computer Graphics Forum) [DOI].
January 2026 – Congratulations to Dr Rapee Wanaset, whose York PhD on neural shape from polarisation (co-supervised with William Smith) has been approved.
September 2025 – Focal talk at the London Imaging Meeting 2025: “Lighting Beneath the Surface: Spectral and Polarised Cues for Next-Generation Facial Imaging”.
2025 – General Chair of CVMP 2025; new papers in Computer Graphics Forum (multi-view shape from polarisation), WACV (image adaptation for colour-vision-deficient viewers) and Perception (colour constancy).
November 2024 – Our facial-ageing research was extended to simulate ageing with and without smoking for a live prime-time special on Swiss public television (RSI).
September 2024 – Keynote at the Computational Color Imaging Workshop (CCIW 2024), Milan.
2024 – Best Paper Award at the London Imaging Meeting for “A Neural Approach for Skin Spectral Reconstruction”, with Fereshteh Mirjalili.