Dr. Christian Richardt

Christian Richardt is a Research Scientist at Meta Reality Labs in Zurich, Switzerland, and previously at the Codec Avatars Lab in Pittsburgh, USA. He was previously a Reader (=Associate Professor) and EPSRC-UKRI Innovation Fellow in the Visual Computing Group and the CAMERA Centre at the University of Bath. His research interests cover the fields of image processing, computer graphics and computer vision, and his research combines insights from vision, graphics and perception to reconstruct visual information from images and videos, to create high-quality visual experiences with a focus on novel-view synthesis.

Christian was previously a postdoctoral researcher working on user-centric video processing and motion capture with Christian Theobalt at the Intel Visual Computing Institute at Saarland University and also in the Graphics, Vision and Video group at Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik in Saarbrücken, Germany. Previously, he was a postdoc in the REVES team at Inria Sophia Antipolis, France, working with George Drettakis and Adrien Bousseau, and he interned with Alexander Sorkine-Hornung at Disney Research Zurich where he worked on Megastereo panoramas.

Christian graduated with a PhD and BA from the University of Cambridge in 2012 and 2007, respectively. His PhD in the Computer Laboratory’s Rainbow Group was supervised by Neil Dodgson. His doctoral research investigated the full life cycle of videos with depth (RGBZ videos): from their acquisition, via filtering and processing, to the evaluation of stereoscopic display.

News

May 2025

We will present five papers by our outstanding interns and collaborators at CVPR 2025 in Nashville: Time of the Flight of the Gaussians (oral), SoundsVista (highlight), IRIS, Geometry-guided Online 3D Video, and Volumetric Surfaces.

I will also be presenting at the CVPR Tutorial on Volumetric Video in the Real World and the 2^nd CVPR Workshop on Neural Fields Beyond Conventional Cameras. Come say hi! :)

Feb 2025

My PhD student Manuel Rey-Area will present his final PhD paper 360° 3D Photos from a Single 360° Input Image at IEEE VR 2025 in Saint-Malo, France.

Dec 2024

We presented URAvatar at SIGGRAPH Asia 2024 in Tokyo.

Oct 2024

We presented Flowed Time of Flight Radiance Fields (F-TöRF) at ECCV 2024 in Milan.

June 2024

We presented five papers by our outstanding interns at CVPR 2024 in Seattle:
PlatoNeRF, HybridNeRF, SpecNeRF, Real Acoustic Fields, and ViewDiff.

My PhD student Jundan Luo has two papers accepted: IntrinsicDiffusion (SIGGRAPH 2024) and CRefNet (TVCG 2024).

November 2023

Three papers accepted:
1. Neural Feature Filtering for Faster Structure-from-Motion Localisation (BMVC 2023 in Aberdeen),
2. PyNeRF: Pyramidal Neural Radiance Fields (NeurIPS 2023 in New Orleans), and
3. VR-NeRF: High-Fidelity Virtualized Walkable Spaces (SIGGRAPH Asia 2023 in Sydney).

Check out our new Eyeful Tower dataset, the highest-resolution, highest-quality, high-dynamic range, multi-view indoor scene dataset powering VR-NeRF.

October 2023

We presented one paper on Neural Fields for Structured Lighting at ICCV 2023 in Paris.

June 2023

We held DynaVis, the Fourth International Workshop on Dynamic Scene Reconstruction at CVPR 2023 in Vancouver (afternoon of Monday 19 June).

We presented two papers at CVPR 2023 in Vancouver: HyperReel and Neural Duplex Radiance Fields for high-fidelity and real-time view synthesis, respectively.

March 2023

I will be serving as an Area Chair for ICCV 2023.

June 2022

We presented our work on high-resolution 360° monocular depth estimation (360MonoDepth) at CVPR 2022 in New Orleans.

April 2022

I’m excited to join Reality Labs Research in Pittsburgh as a Research Scientist Lead.

Selected publications

IntrinsicDiffusion: Joint Intrinsic Layers from Latent Diffusion Models
Jundan Luo, Duygu Ceylan, Jae Shin Yoon, Nanxuan Zhao, Julien Philip, Anna Frühstück, Wenbin Li, Christian Richardt and Tuanfeng Y. Wang
SIGGRAPH 2024

• project page
• paper
• supplemental document
• DOI

PlatoNeRF: 3D Reconstruction in Plato’s Cave via Single-View Two-Bounce Lidar
Tzofi Klinghoffer, Xiaoyu Xiang, Siddharth Somasundaram, Yuchen Fan, Christian Richardt, Ramesh Raskar and Rakesh Ranjan
CVPR 2024 (oral/award candidate, 0.8%/0.2% acceptance rate)

• project page
• paper and supplement (arXiv)
• video (YouTube)
• source code
• dataset

HybridNeRF: Efficient Neural Rendering via Adaptive Volumetric Surfaces
Haithem Turki, Vasu Agrawal, Samuel Rota Bulò, Lorenzo Porzi, Peter Kontschieder, Deva Ramanan, Michael Zollhöfer and Christian Richardt
CVPR 2024 (highlight, 2.8% acceptance rate)

• project page
• paper and supplement (arXiv)

SpecNeRF: Gaussian Directional Encoding for Specular Reflections
Li Ma, Vasu Agrawal, Haithem Turki, Changil Kim, Chen Gao, Pedro V. Sander, Michael Zollhöfer and Christian Richardt
CVPR 2024 (highlight, 2.8% acceptance rate)

• project page
• paper and supplement (arXiv)
• video (YouTube)

360MonoDepth: High-Resolution 360° Monocular Depth Estimation
Manuel Rey-Area*, Mingze Yuan* and Christian Richardt
Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2022

• project page
• paper (arXiv)
• supplement
• results website

Capture, Reconstruction, and Representation of the Visual Real World for Virtual Reality
Christian Richardt, James Tompkin and Gordon Wetzstein
Book chapter in Real VR – Immersive Digital Reality, Springer 2020

• preprint
• DOI

HoloGAN: Unsupervised learning of 3D representations from natural images
Thu Nguyen-Phuoc, Chuan Li, Lucas Theis, Christian Richardt and Yong-Liang Yang
International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) 2019

• project page
• video
• paper (arXiv)

Capture4VR: From VR Photography to VR Video
Christian Richardt, Peter Hedman, Ryan S. Overbeck, Brian Cabral, Robert Konrad and Steve Sullivan
Course at SIGGRAPH 2019

• course page
• course abstract

Near-Eye Display and Tracking Technologies for Virtual and Augmented Reality
George Koulieris, Kaan Akşit, Michael Stengel, Rafał K. Mantiuk, Katerina Mania and Christian Richardt
Computer Graphics Forum (Eurographics 2019 State-of-the-Art Report)

• project page
• STAR preprint

Megastereo: Constructing High-Resolution Stereo Panoramas
Christian Richardt, Yael Pritch, Henning Zimmer and Alexander Sorkine-Hornung
Proceedings of CVPR 2013 (oral presentation, 3.3% acceptance rate)

• project page
• paper
• video
• poster
• DOI