Srinivasa Narasimhan


 U.A. and Helen Whitaker Professor of Robotics
 The Robotics Institute (Smith Hall 223)
 School of Computer Science
 Carnegie Mellon University

 [Bio]

Illumination and Imaging Laboratory (ILIM)

VISIT IMAGING.CS.CMU.EDU!

The ILIM Laboratory at the Robotics Institute is dedicated to the study of light transport and the development of novel illumination and imaging technologies. The laboratory is part of the broader imaging, computer vision and computer graphics groups at Carnegie Mellon. Our research is motivated by applications in the areas of digital imaging, computer vision, computer graphics and robotics. Please visit the official website for the lab for detailed information about research projects and publications. The sponsors for these research projects include the Office of Naval Research (ONR), Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA), National Science Foundation (NSF), NASA, Department of Energy, Department of Agriculture, Department of Transportation, Army Research Laboratory, the Okawa Foundation, IARPA, Siemens Corporate Research, Princeton (SCR), Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT), Adobe, Ford, General Motors, Tonbo Imaging, Intel Science and Technology Center in Embedded Computing (ISTC-EC), Chemimage, Google, Meta, Heinz Foundation, National Wine and Grape Industry, Zillow Group and Highmark Disruptive Health Technologies Institute (DHTI).

Check out these recent works:
MHz Light Steering with no moving parts
Vibration Sensing
Seeing Below the Skin (Collaborative NSF EXPEDITIONS)
Fermat Non-line-of-sight scanning
Triangulation Light Curtains
EpiToF, Episcan 3D Sensors
Smart Headlights



Best Paper and Demo Awards

  • Best Paper Honorable Mention Award, IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition , CVPR 2022
  • Best Paper Award, IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium, IV 2021
  • Best Paper Honorable Mention Award, IEEE International Conference on Computational Photography, ICCP 2020
  • Best Demo Award, IEEE International Conference on Computational Photography, ICCP 2020
  • Best Paper Award, IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2019
  • Best Paper Finalist, IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2019
  • Best Demo Award, IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2015
  • Best Demo Award, IEEE International Conference on Computational Photography, ICCP 2015
  • Marr Prize Honorable Mention Award, International Conference on Computer Vision, ICCV 2013
  • Best Paper Runner-up Award, ACM Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games, I3D 2013
  • Best Paper Honorable Mention Award, International Conference on Computational Photography, ICCP 2012
  • Best Paper Award, IEEE Workshop on Projector Camera Systems, PROCAMS 2009
  • Best Paper Award, IEEE Workshop on Photometric Analysis in Computer Vision, PACV 2007
  • Best Paper Honorable Mention Award, IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2000


  • Research Group

  • Current Members
  • Robert Tamburo (Project Scientist, RI)
  • Mark Sheinin (Post-doc, RI)
  • Mani Ramanagopal (Post-doc, RI)
  • Gaurav Parmar (PhD, RI)
  • Sriram Narayanan (PhD, RI)
  • Guanzhou Ji (PhD, Architecture)
  • Anurag Ghosh (PhD, RI)
  • Khiem Vuong (MSR, RI)
  • Shen Zheng (MSCV, RI)
  • Mayank Mishra (MSR, RI)
  • Brian Hutchison (admin support)

  • Past Members
  • Postdocs and Research Scientists
  • Adithya Pediredla (Assistant Professor, Dartmouth)
  • Wil Hamilton (Staff Researcher, NREC)
  • Suren Jayasuriya (Assistant Professor, ASU)
  • Yu Sheng (NVIDIA)
  • Shuntaro Yamazaki (Google)
  • Feng Yang (Google Research)
  • PhD Students
  • Sid Ancha (MIT Postdoc)
  • Shumian Xin (Adobe)
  • Dinesh Reddy (Amazon)
  • Tiancheng Zhi (ByteDance)
  • Joe Bartels (Phlux)
  • Chao Liu (NVIDIA)
  • Marie Nguyen
  • Minh Vo (Facebook Oculus)
  • Jian Wang (Snap Research)
  • Supreeth Achar (Google Seattle)
  • Yuandong Tian (FAIR, MSR PhD Fellow)
  • Pete Barnum (Google)
  • Jean-Francois Lalonde (Associate Professor, Laval University, MSR PhD Fellow)
  • Mohit Gupta (Assistant Professor, Univ. Wisconsin Madison)
  • Chenyu Wu (Epson Research)
  • Sanjeev J. Koppal (Associate Professor, ECE, University of Florida)
  • Gyeongmin Choe (Samsung Resesearch)
  • Raoul de Charette (Researcher, INRIA, France)
  • Masters and Undergrads
  • Lulu Ricketts (MSCV, Waymo)
  • Roshini Kannan (MSCV, Magna)
  • Tianyuan Zhang (MSR, MIT PhD)
  • Bowei Chen (MSR, UW PhD)
  • Gaurav Pathak (MSR, Adobe Research)
  • Neha Boloor (MSCV, RI)
  • Shefali Srivastava (MSCV, RI)
  • Tiffany Ma (MS, CS)
  • Yaadhav Raaj (MSR, Agility Robotics)
  • Zis Economou (MS Research Staff)
  • Yifei Liu (MSR, ASU PhD)
  • Abhinav Garlapati (MSCV)
  • Tiffany Deng (MSCV)
  • Sharon Jin (MSCV)
  • Manasi Muglikar (MS, ECE)
  • Srihari Sankar (MS, Intel)
  • Esha Uboweja (MSCV)
  • Jennifer Lake (MSCV)
  • Utkarsh Sinha (MSCV)
  • Jai Prakash (MSCV)
  • Xudong Chen (MSCV)
  • Maying Shen (MSCV)
  • Mengqing Jiang (MSCV)
  • Fangyu Li (MSCV)
  • Zhiyu Min (MSCV)
  • Yijun Luo (MSCV)
  • Subhagato Dutta (MS, Apple)
  • Abhishek Chugh (MS, Google)
  • Vinay Palakkode (MS, Apple)
  • Vivek T. Umapathi (MRSD, Takata)
  • Prakaash Karthikeyan (MS, Intel)
  • You Jia (MS, Facebook)
  • Yulong Shi (Visiting MS student, BeiHang University, Beijing)
  • Dengyu Liu (Summer Intern, RIT)
  • Xiaowei Zhu (MS)
  • Manasvi Tickoo (MS)
  • Prince Jain (MS)
  • Lucas Crandall (MS)
  • Surbhi Singhania (MS)
  • Shantanu Vyas (UG)
  • Ji Hyun Lee (UG)
  • Harry Gifford (UG)
  • Luo Yi Tan (UG, ETC Masters)
  • Bin Xie (Visitor)
  • Jennifer Turken (support staff)
  • Jessica Butterbaugh (support staff)


  • Teaching

  • Master of Science - Computer Vision [MSCV] Since Fall 2015.
  • 16-720: Graduate Computer Vision [CMU Canvas]
  • 15-385(685): Undergraduate Computer Vision [Spring 2012]  [Spring 2007]  [Spring 2006]
  • 16-823: Physics-based methods in Computer vision [Spring 2024]  [Spring 2016]  [Spring 2011]  [Fall 2007]  [Fall 2006]  [Fall 2005]
  • 15-462: Computer Graphics [Fall 2014]   [Fall 2013]   [Fall 2012]   [Fall 2011]   [Fall 2010]   [Fall 2009]
  • 16-421: Vision Sensors [Spring 2009] [Spring 2008]


  • Grants and Gifts

  • NSF-NIFA , "AIIRA: AI Institute for Resilient Agriculture", [2021-2026]
  • General Motors, Israel, "Driving in Bad Weather", [2022-2024]
  • NSF IIS-2107236 , "Collaborative Research: RI : Medium: Thermal Computational Imaging", [2021-2024]
  • NSF CNS-2038612, "CPS: TTP Option: Medium: Discovering and Resolving Anomalies in Smart Cities", [2020-2023]
  • NSF IIS-1900821, "RI: Medium: To Sense or Not to Sense: Energy Efficient Adaptive Sensing for Autonomous Systems", [2019-2022]
  • NSF EXPEDITIONS, "Computational Photo-Scatterography: Unraveling Scattered Photons for Bio-Imaging", [2018-2023]
  • Zillow Gift, "Physically Based Indoor Scene Understanding", [2020]
  • DARPA REVEAL Phase II, "Active Illumination and Imaging across Millisecond to Picosecond Time Scales for General LOS/NLOS Scene Understanding",[2018-2019]
  • Adobe Research Gift, "Dynamic 3D Reconstruction", [2017-2018]
  • ONR DURIP, "Building Energy Efficient Computational Illumination and Imaging Devices", [2016-2017]
  • DARPA REVEAL Phase I, "Energy efficient Computational Light Transport Parsing",[2016-2017]
  • Heinz Endowments,"Plattform Pittsburgh: Visual Tomography of Air Quality", [2016-2017]
  • NASA ESI,"Autonomous Navigation for Exploration on Icy Moons", [2016-2017]
  • Chemimage, "Scene understanding on a Vehicle with SWIR Multispectral Sensing", [2016-2017]
  • DHTI,"Technologies for Skin Imaging", [2015-2016]
  • NSF CNS-1446601, "CPS: Synergy: TTP Option: Anytime Visual Scene Understanding for Heterogeneous and Distributed Cyber-Physical Systems", [2014-2018]
  • ONR N00014-14-1-0595, "Data-driven Event Browsing from Multiple Mobile Cameras", [2014-2017]
  • NSF IIS-1317749, "NRI: Small: Robotic Scouts: Augmenting Human Perception for Underground Rescue", [2013-2016]
  • US DOT RITA University Transportation Center Grant, "Smart Headlights" and "Sensing for Dense Platooning", [2013-2016]
  • Tonbo Imaging Gift, "Long Range Imaging through Turbulence", [2013]
  • Ford University Research Program Gift, "Programmable Headlights", [2013-2014]
  • Intel Science and Technology Center in Embedded Computing, "Embedded System Design for Smart Automobile Headlights", [2011-2014]
  • Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, "Fast, Mobile and Detailed Light Field Capture and Scene Reconstruction", [2011-2012]
  • ONR N00014-11-1-0295, "Principled Combination of Physical and Data-driven Approaches for Scene Understanding" [2011-2013]
  • NSF IIS-0964562 , "Collaborative Research: Recognition of Materials" [2010-2014]
  • Okawa Foundation Research Grant, "Convergence of Illumination and Imaging for Scene Understanding" [2009-2010]
  • ONR N00014-08-1-0330, "Photometric Methods for Scene Understanding" [2008-2010]
  • US-Israel Binational Science Foundation, "Sensing Fusion for Underwater Scene Recovery"[2007-2010]
  • NSF CAREER IIS-0643628, "Making Computer Vision Successful in Scattering Media", [2007-2011]
  • ONR N00014-07-1-0522, "IEEE/ONR Workshop on Volumetric Scattering in Vision and Graphics", [2007-2007]
  • NSF CCF-0541307, "Collaborative Research: Fast and Accurate Volumetric Rendering of Scattering Phenomena in Computer Graphics", [2006-2008]
  • ONR DURIP N00014-06-1-0762, "Instrumentation in Support of Flexible Imaging Systems and Imaging in Dispersive Media", [2006-2007]
  • ONR N00014-05-1-0188, "A Physical Approach to Optical Underwater Imaging", [2005-2007]