Research in the group asks how the appearance of real materials and human skin can be measured efficiently, represented compactly and reproduced faithfully: in rendering, in commercial capture systems and for human observers.
Bringing spectral accuracy to everyday rendering pipelines. Learned spectral codes let an unmodified RGB renderer approximate spectral rendering in two passes (ACM TOG / SIGGRAPH Asia 2026). Related work covers spectral upsampling of RGB illumination (EGSR 2022) and the rendering of fluorescent objects with mutual illumination, with Shoji Tominaga (Color Research & Application 2022; IEEE TVCG 2026).
Practical capture and modelling of human skin and faces: measurement and reconstruction of spectral skin reflectance (Computer Graphics Forum 2020), neural encoding of hyperspectral skin reflectance (3DV 2024), RGB measurement of fluorescence and blood distributions in skin (CIC 2024), neural skin spectral reconstruction (London Imaging Meeting 2024, Best Paper Award), desktop high-quality facial capture (ECCV 2022, oral) and realistic facial age transformation (Computer Graphics Forum 2024).
Acquisition, representation and consistent reuse of material appearance: the Eurographics state-of-the-art report on BRDF representation and acquisition (Computer Graphics Forum 2016), single-image woven fabric modelling (ACM TOG 2017), perceptually validated BRDF parameter remapping across renderers (IEEE TVCG), goniochromatic packaging materials (The Visual Computer 2021) and the book Virtual Material Acquisition and Representation for Computer Graphics (Morgan & Claypool 2018; Springer Nature 2022).
Polarimetric cues for surface shape and reflectance, from spherical Stokes reflectance fields (ECCV Workshops 2012) to neural-field multi-view shape from polarisation (Computer Graphics Forum 2025), supported by York’s multispectral polarimetric light stage.
With vision scientists at Giessen and Bournemouth: colour constancy in virtual reality (Journal of Vision 2024), perceptual dimensions of specular and diffuse reflection (ACM Transactions on Applied Perception 2020), colour constancy algorithms evaluated on spectrally rendered ground truth (Perception 2025), and image adaptation for colour-vision-deficient viewers (WACV 2025).
Generative models that respect physics: text-to-SVBRDF generation (EGSR 2024), PBR-inspired controllable diffusion for image generation (Eurographics 2026) and physics-guided motion losses for video generation (ICML 2026).
SPECTRASKIN: Spectral Skin Modelling and Rendering for Realistic Digital Faces (2019–2024). Research Council of Norway, Young Research Talents, grant 288670; Principal Investigator; proposal rated 7/7 (“Exceptional”). Project partner: Imperial College London. [project page]
From Spectra to Colour: A Big-Data Computational Approach (2023–2025). BBSRC, BB/X01312X/1; Principal Investigator, with Co-Investigator Dr Matteo Toscani (Bournemouth University). [project page]
York multispectral polarimetric light stage, operational since 2024: a purpose-built darkroom with 15 polarisation cameras and a custom multispectral polarimetric LED dome.
Co-inventor of the patent family “Image capture and processing” (GB2596582; US11530986B2), deployed in Lumirithmic’s commercial capture pipeline; three further applications are pending. The single-image woven fabric model is used in KiSP/Yulio’s XR pipeline.