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Wolfgang Heidrich

Professor, Computer Science

Principal Investigator, Computational Imaging Group

Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Science and Engineering Division
Email icon wolfgang.heidrich@kaust.edu.sa

Program Affiliations

Center of Excellence

Biography

Wolfgang Heidrich is a professor of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering at KAUST. He is a member of the KAUST Visual Computing Center and served as its director for eight years, from 2014 to 2021. Heidrich is a pioneer in computational imaging and display, which seeks to advance imaging and display systems by co-designing optics, electronics, and algorithms.

Heidrich received his Diploma in Computer Science from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (FAU), Germany, in 1995, followed by an M.Math from the University of Waterloo, Canada, in 1996. He also earned a Ph.D. in 1999 from FAU.

In 2014, Heidrich was honored with a Humboldt Research Award in recognition of his contributions to computational imaging. He is also a Fellow of the IEEE and Eurographics, acknowledging his significant impact on the field.

Research Interests

Professor Heidrich's core research interests are in computational imaging and display, an emerging research area within visual computing, which combines methods from computer graphics, machine vision, imaging, inverse methods, optics and perception to develop new sensing and display technologies.

Computational imaging is the hardware-software co-design of imaging devices, which aims to optically encode information about the real world in such a way that image sensors can capture it. The resulting images represent detailed information such as scene geometry, motion of solids and liquids, multi-spectral information or high contrast (high-dynamic range), which can then be computationally decoded using inverse methods, machine learning and numerical optimization.

Heidrich and his colleagues in the Computational Imaging Group develop end-to-end learned imaging systems, increasing the complexity of the optical design space and expanding the methodology to fully automate the design of complex optical systems instead of individual components.
Keyword tag icon
Computational Photography computer graphics optics inverse methods

Education Profile

  • Ph.D., University of Erlangen, 1999

  • M.Math, University of Waterloo, 1996Diploma in Computer Science, University of Erlangen, 1995

Awards and Recognitions

  • Humboldt Research Award, 2014

  • Fellow of IEEE and Eurographics, 2024

  • ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award, 2024

  • ACM SIGGRAPH Test-of-Time Award, 2024

Publications

  • Low-budget Transient Imaging using Photonic Mixer Devices F. Heide, M. Hullin, J. Gregson, W. Heidrich ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. Siggaraph), 32(3):9 pages, July 2013

  • Adaptive Image Synthesis for Compressive Displays F. Heide, G. Wetzstein, R. Raskar, W. Heidrich ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. Siggaraph), 2013

  • High-Quality Computational Imaging Through Simple Lenses F. Heide, M. Rouf, M. Hullin, B. Labitzke, W. Heidrich, A. Kolb ACM Transactions on Graphics, 32:10 pages, 2013

  • Stochastic Tomography and its Applications in 3D Imaging of Mixing Fluids J. Gregson, M. Krimerman, M. Hullin, W. Heidrich ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. SIGGRAPH), 31(3):52:1–52:10, August 2012

  • Layered 3D: Tomographic Image Synthesis for Attenuation-based Light Field and High Dynamic Range Displays G.Wetzstein, D. Lanman,W. Heidrich, R. Raskar ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. SIGGRAPH), 30(3):95:1–95:12, August 2011

  • HDR-VDP-2: A calibrated visual metric for visibility and quality predictions in all luminance conditions R. Mantiuk, K. Kim, A. Rempel,W. Heidrich ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. SIGGRAPH), 30(3):40:1–40:14, August 2011

  • https://vccimaging.org/People/heidriw/publications.html

Research Areas

  • Computer Science
  • Electrical and Computer Engineering
  • Visual Computing

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