Next D1 Seminar, entitled “Compute-Based Rendering across the Board: Efficient Methods for Meshes, Point Clouds and Radiance Fields”, will take place on March 15 at 10 am, in room A006.
Abstract:
Dr. Kerbl will present his on-going research on compute-based rendering and its use across 3D representations and applications. Modern 3D content, both synthetic and captured, contains an unprecedented amount of geometric detail. At the same time, user appreciation of 3D content demands low-latency feedback loops: processing, exploring or modifying 3D scenes should be fast, or—even better—instant. Failure to meet performance targets is often answered by applying more raw compute power to the problem. This policy has led to systematic hardware hoarding, a rift between “GPU-rich” and “GPU-poor”, increased reliance on cloud computing and an overall rise in global resource consumption. A more sustainable solution to this challenge lies in the careful design of inherently parallel algorithms, finding novel data structures and optimal 3D scene representations for specific tasks. One pillar of the research by Dr. Kerbl et al. towards this goal is the use of compute-based rendering: exploiting GPU compute to assist or replace the fixed-function pipeline for image formation. This talk illustrates concrete examples where compute-based rendering achieves or surpasses state-of-the-art results, given only a fraction of its competitors’ runtime resources. Apart from image formation itself, this talk will also discuss recent applications in interactive editing and differentiable rendering methods for radiance fields (NeRFshop, 3D Gaussian Splatting).
Bio:
After a Bachelor and Master’s degree in information technology, Dr. Kerbl received his PhD from Graz University of Technology in 2018 for his research on GPU workload scheduling. In 2019, he briefly joined Epic Games to work on the Nanite Virtual Geometry feature of Unreal Engine 5. This was followed by a postdoc research stay at TU Wien and another at Inria, Université Côte d’Azur in the GraphDeco group. Currently, he acts as principal investigator on a project acquired in 2022 for Instant Visualization and Interaction for Point Clouds (IVILPC). Dr. Kerbl has taught multiple courses on the design and programming of modern GPU hardware at three Austrian universities and has (co-)supervised several students from undergraduate to PhD level.
