Radomír Měch

Principal Scientist, Adobe Research

San Jose

Radomír heads the 3D Graphics and Interactive Design Lab at Adobe Research. He leads teams of research scientists and research engineers, and one invaluable technical artist. The researchers span areas of 2D and 3D design, 2D and 3D graphics, with focus on AI driven technologies. His areas of research are procedural modeling, with a particular focus on interaction with procedural models and casual modeling, rendering, 3D printing, and image evaluation algorithms. Currently, he is focusing on 3D driven image editing, 3D driven diffusion methods and developing frameworks to accelerate testing of new AI-driven interactive workflows.

Radomír believes that Adobe Research has an efficient and enjoyable model for producing magic features for our products. Many of Adobe Research’s projects start with internships. A typical researcher is involved in 2-6 internships each summer investigating new ideas. Many of those internships lead to university collaboration and results in high quality publications. The close ties with academia allow the researches to keep up to speed with latest academic results but also attract top talent in terms of interns and full time hires. Each researcher has also projects that are in further stages, where the investigation is followed by building a prototype that can be shown to product teams, or the prototype is already successfully sold and the researcher, with possible help from the tech transfer engineer, transfers the technology into a product.

Radomír’s role is to interface with Adobe’s product teams, the customers of the technologies developed by his team and to define and drive the strategy and research themes for the lab.  Since the inception of his group in 2008 his team has shipped many technologies, including:

 

3D modeling and rendering:

* Repousse – 2D curve inflation in Photoshop 3D CS5, with improved inflation engine in CS6.

* Super bevels and new adaptive extrusion engine in Photoshop CS6

* Ray-tracer in Photoshop 3D (CS4, improved in CS5, new enhancements in CS6) and in After Effects CS5

* Multitone 3D printing in Photoshop CC 14.2

* 3D Filters in Photoshop CC 2015

* Blendshape Transfer for Fuse CC

 

Simulation:

* Simulating bristle tips in Photoshop CS5

* Bristle brush in AI CS5

* Mixer brush in Photoshop CS5 and Color Lava Photoshop iPad app

* Procedural water color simulation on ipad – Adobe Eazel for Photoshop CS5.5

* Continuous stroking model in Adobe Sketch 2014

* Kubelka-Munk Pigment Model in Adobe Sketch 2014

* Water color simulation in Adobe Sketch (also showcased at Ipad Pro launch in the fall of 2015)

 

Graphics design:

* Beautiful strokes in Illustrator CS5, more features in CS6, and CC, and in FlashPro CC2014

* Pattern scripts for Photoshop 14.2

* Tree, Flame, Picture frame filter in PS CC2014 (15.2)

* Comic Kit and Cloth Texture Generator filters for Ps 

 

Image editing:

* Selection Editing, PSe, Orion, Photoshop

* Level-Set based Selection Editing (PSE13, Photsohop Mix 2014)

* Crop Suggestion in PSE 2014, Ps Mix 1.4

* Saliency estimation in Photoshop Mix 1.3, 2.0

* Automatic Content-Aware Stylization in PSE14

* Normal Map from Legacy Image, Photoshop 13.1

* Outdoor Lighting Estimation to Dimension 2016

* Automatic Eye Opening, PSE 2016

* Match Indoor Lighting to Dn 3.0, 2019

* ML Denoiser to Dn 2.3 + Dn 3.0,

* Deep skin to PSE 2019

* Interactive Colorization to PSE 2019

* Sky Segmentation to Premiere Elements 2020 & Sky Replacement in Ps

* Deep Skip Neural Filter in Ps

* Smart Portrain Neural Filter in Ps

* Makeup transfer Neural Filter in PS

* Harmonization Neural Filter in Ps

 

Radomír’s projects:

Procedural modeling, casual modeling and 3D printing

Before Radomír became a manager in 2008, and while his team was growing, he had time to built a procedural modeling framework. The goal of the project was to allow users to create new procedural brushes or other tools in our applications.

The system first shipped in Flash Authoring and then in Photoshop CS6, enhanced in CC 14.1. With Daichi, the procedural artist on board, he and his team shipped more advanced Deco filters in 14.3 (including image frame, flame and tree filter). Radomír continues to enchance the framework, for example by adding support for iOS, since it provides means for Daichi to deploy new features and for others to quickly prototype new tools. For example, the procedural watercolor simulation shipped in Eazel was prototyped in Deco. See below for more details on the system.

Radomír is a big proponent of 3D casual modeling. In general, he would like to make it easier for people to create and modify 3D content. With the increase popularity of 3D printing and Virtual Reality there will be an increasing need for 3D content. Conversely, being able to easily create 3D content will aid the adoption of 3D printers and virtual reality. Procedural modeling is one of the possible means towards easy modeling and Radomír have explored several projects on making it easy to author and control procedural or parametric models.

He has also been a proponent of 3D printing. He has been part of the initial push for 3D printing at Adobe and has worked on several projects, several resulting in publications (link to Bedrich), some only in patents (http://www.3ders.org/articles/20150413-adobe-steps-further-into-3d-printing-industry-with-print-smoothing-patent.html), and some made it to product (multitone 3D printing as experimental feature in Photoshop CC 2014).

As an avid photographer, he was also interested in developing some features for Lightroom. With help from two researcher’s from the Media Intelligence Lab,Radomír has developed in house technology over past few years for automatic image cropping, to enhance the image composition or for zoom in, for image saliency, for evaluation of image aesthetics and for album curation – selecting representative images from image sets.

These are exciting projects for Radomír as a researcher since he is learning new skills and as a customer who needs such features.

Other projects that shipped and to which he has contributed directly are the procedural splat based water color simulation on iPad (Eazel), the ray-tracer in Photoshop, 3D extrusions in Photoshop, Multitone  3D printing in Photoshop (for smoothly mixing two colors in FDM printers), or pattern scripts in Photoshop.

Many other internship or collaboration project resulted in a publication. The list of publications below can give you an idea of the variety of topics.

Publications

Warpy: Multi-view Curve Sketching in Augmented Reality

Alghofaili, R., Nguyen, C., Krs, V., Carr, N., Měch, R., Yu, L. (Mar. 29, 2023)

2023 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR)

MatFormer: A Generative Model for Procedural Materials

Guerrero, P., Hašan, M., Sunkavalli, K., Měch, R., Boubekeur, T., Mitra, N. (Aug. 8, 2022)

ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. SIGGRAPH 2022)

Automatic Differentiable Procedural Modeling

Gaillard, M., Krs, V., Gori, G., Měch, R., Benes, B. (May. 24, 2022)

Computer Graphics Forum (CGF)

CPFN: Cascaded Primitive Fitting Networks for High-Resolution Point Clouds

Lê, E., Sung, M., Ceylan, D., Měch, R., Boubekeur, T., Mitra, N. (Oct. 11, 2021)

ICCV 2021

A Survey of Control Mechanisms for Creative Pattern Generation

Gieseke, L., Asente, P., Měch, R., Benes, B., Fuchs, M. (May. 3, 2021)

Computer Graphics Forum (Proc. Eurographics 2021 — STARs)

MATch: Differentiable Material Graphs for Procedural Material Capture

Shi, L., Li, B., Hasan, M., Sunkavalli, K., Boubekeur, T., Měch, R., Matusik, W. (Nov. 26, 2020)

SIGGRAPH Asia 2020

ParSeNet: A Parametric Surface Fitting Network for 3D Point Clouds

Sharma, G., Liu, D., Kalogerakis, E., Maji, S., Chaudhuri, S., Měch, R. (Aug. 24, 2020)

ECCV

Learning Generative Models of Shape Handles

Gadelha, M., Gori, G., Ceylan, D., Měch, R., Carr, N., Boubekeur, T., Wang, R., Maji, S. (Jun. 16, 2020)

IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)

PICO: procedural iterative constrained optimizer for geometric modeling

Krs, V., Měch, R., Gaillard, M., Carr, N., Benes, B. (May. 18, 2020)

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics

Adaptive Photographic Composition Guidance

E, J., Fried, O., Lu, J., Zhang, J., Měch, R., Echevarria, J., Hanrahan, P., Landay, J. (Apr. 1, 2020)

ACM CHI 2020

Learning to Understand Image Blur

Zhang, S., Shen, X., Lin, Z., Měch, R., Costeira, J., Moura, J. (Jun. 18, 2018)

CVPR 2018

Good View Hunting: Learning Photo Composition from 1 Million View Pairs

Wei, Z., Zhang, J., Shen, X., Lin, Z., Měch, R., Hoai, M., Samaras, D. (Jun. 18, 2018)

CVPR 2018

Good View Hunting: Learning Photo Composition from Dense View Pairs

Wei, Z., Zhang, J., Shen, X., Lin, Z., Měch, R., Hoai, M., Samaras, D. (Jun. 18, 2018)

Proc. IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)

Extending Manual Drawing Practices with Artist-Centric Programming Tools

Jacobs, J., Brandt, J., Měch, R., Resnick, M. (Apr. 21, 2018)

Best paper award.

ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Learning to Detect Multiple Photographic Defects

Yu, N., Shen, X., Lin, Z., Měch, R., Barnes, C. (Mar. 12, 2018)

WACV 2018 : IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision

Personalized Image Aesthetics

Ren, J., Shen, X., Lin, Z., Měch, R., Foran, D. (Oct. 22, 2017)

ICCV 2017 - IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision

Recognizing and Curating Photo Albums via Event-Specific Image Importance

Wang, Y., Lin, Z., Shen, X., Měch, R., Miller, G., Cottrell, G. (Sep. 4, 2017)

BMVC 2017 - 28th British Machine Vision Conference

Salient Object Subtizing

Zhang, J., Ma, S., Sameki, M., Sclaroff, S., Betke, M., Lin, Z., Shen, X., Price, B., Měch, R. (Sep. 1, 2017)

International Journal of Computer Vision

Skippy: Single View 3D Curve Interactive Modeling

Krs, V., Yumer, E., Carr, N., Benes, B., Měch, R. (Jul. 30, 2017)

ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH 2017)

FLOWPAK: Flow-based Ornamental Element Packing

Saputra, R., Kaplan, C., Asente, P., Měch, R. (May. 17, 2017)

Winner of the Michael A.J. Sweeney Award for Best Student Papers

Graphics Interface 2017

Supporting Expressive Procedural Art Creation through Direct Manipulation

Jacobs, J., Gogia, S., Měch, R., Brandt, J. (May. 6, 2017)

Best paper award.

CHI 2017 – ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Photo Aesthetics Ranking Network with Attributes and Content Adaptation

Kong, S., Shen, X., Lin, Z., Měch, R., Fowlkes, C. (Oct. 8, 2016)

European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV)

Shape synthesis from sketches via procedural models and convolutional networks

Huang, H., Kalogerakis, E., Yumer, E., Měch, R. (Aug. 3, 2016)

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics

Unconstrained Salient Object Detection via Proposal Subset Optimization

Zhang, J., Sclaroff, S., Lin, Z., Shen, X., Price, B., Měch, R. (Jun. 1, 2016)

CVPR 2016

Event-specific Image Importance

Wang, Y., Lin, Z., Shen, X., Měch, R., Miller, G., Cottrell, G. (Jun. 1, 2016)

CVPR 2016

Deep Multi-Patch Aggregation Network for Image Style, Aesthetics, and Quality Estimation

Lu, X., Lin, Z., Shen, X., Měch, R., Wang, J. (Dec. 1, 2015)

ICCV 2015

Minimum Barrier Salient Object Detection at 80 FPS

Zhang, J., Lin, Z., Shen, X., Měch, R., Price, B., Sclaroff, S. (Dec. 1, 2015)

ICCV 2015

Procedural Modeling Using Autoencoder Networks

Yumer, M., Asente, P., Měch, R., Kara, L. (Nov. 9, 2015)

UIST 2015 - ACM User Interface Software and Technology Symposium

Salient Object Subitizing

Zhang, J., Ma, S., Sameki, M., Sclaroff, S., Betke, M., Lin, Z., Shen, X., Price, B., Měch, R. (Jun. 1, 2015)

CVPR 2015

Data-Driven Automatic Cropping for Semantic Composition Search

Samii, A., Lin, Z., Měch, R. (Feb. 1, 2015)

Computer Graphics Forum, 33(1), 2015

Learning an Aesthetic Photo Cropping Cascade

Wang, P., Lin, Z., Měch, R. (Jan. 1, 2015)

WACV 2015

Automatic Image Cropping using Visual Composition, Boundary Simplicity and Content Preservation Models

Fang, C., Lin, Z., Měch, R., Shen, X. (Nov. 1, 2014)

ACM Multimedia 2014

Automatic Cropping Using Semantic Composition Search

Samii, A., Měch, R., Lin, Z. (Oct. 1, 2014)

Computer Graphics Forum. doi: 10.1111/cgf.12465

DecoBrush: Drawing Structured Decorative Patterns by Example

Lu, J., Barnes, C., Wan, C., Asente, P., Měch, R., Finkelstein, A. (Aug. 12, 2014)

ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. of SIGGRAPH 2014), 33(4), August 2014

Dual-Color Mixing for Fused Deposition Modeling Printers

Reiner, T., Carr, N., Měch, R., Stava, O., Dachsbacher, C., Miller, G. (Apr. 10, 2014)

Computer Graphics Forum (Proc. Eurographics), 33(2), 2014

Inverse Procedural Modelling of Trees

Stava, O., Pirk, S., Kratt, J., Chen, B., Měch, R., Deussen, O., Benes, B. (Mar. 20, 2014)

Computer Graphics Forum

Painting with Polygons: A Procedural Watercolor Engine

DiVerdi, S., Krishnaswamy, A., Měch, R., Ito, D. (May. 1, 2013)

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG)

The Deco Framework for Interactive Procedural Modeling

Měch, R., Miller, G. (Dec. 28, 2012)

Journal of Computer Graphics Techniques (JCGT), 1(1):43--99

Learning Design Patterns with Bayesian Grammar Induction

Talton, J., Yang, L., Kumar, R., Lim, M., Goodman, N., Měch, R. (Oct. 7, 2012)

UIST'12

Plastic Trees: Interactive Self-Adapting Botanical Tree Models

Pirk, S., Stava, O., Kratt, J., Neubert, B., Měch, R., Benes, B., Deussen, O. (Aug. 7, 2012)

ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. SIGGRAPH 2012)

Stress Relief: Improving Structural Strength of 3D Printable Objects

Stava, O., Vanek, J., Benes, B., Carr, N., Měch, R. (Aug. 7, 2012)

ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. SIGGRAPH 2012)

A lightweight, procedural, vector watercolor painting engine

DiVerdi, S., Krishnaswamy, A., Měch, R., Ito, D. (Apr. 3, 2012)

Best Paper Award

Interactive 3D Graphics and Games (I3D)

Guided Procedural Modeling

Beneš, B., Šťava, O., Měch, R., Miller, G. (Apr. 11, 2011)

Computer Graphics Forum (Proc. Eurographics), 30(2), 2011

Metropolis Procedural Modeling

Talton, J., Lou, Y., Lesser, S., Duke, J., Měch, R., Koltun, V. (Apr. 1, 2011)

ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG) , 30(2), April 2011

Inverse Procedural Modeling by Automatic Generation of L-systems

Šťava, O., Beneš, B., Měch, R., Aliaga, D., Krištof, P. (May. 3, 2010)

Computer Graphics Forum (Proc. Eurographics), 29(2), 2010

Optimizing Structure Preserving Embedded Deformation for Resizing Images and Vector Art

Huang, Q., Měch, R., Carr, N. (Jul. 13, 2009)

Computer Graphics Forum, Pacific Graphics 2009 Conference Proceedings, 29 (7)

Detecting Symmetries and Curvilinear Arrangements in Vector Art

Yeh, Y., Měch, R. (Mar. 23, 2009)

Computer Graphics Forum (Proc. Eurographics), 28(2), 2009

Self-organizing Tree Models for Image Synthesis

Palubicki, W., Horel, K., Longay, S., Runions, A., Lane, B., Měch, R., Prusinkiewicz, P. (Feb. 9, 2009)

ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. SIGGRAPH), 28(3), 2009

An Example-based Procedural System for Element Arrangement

Ijiri, T., Měch, R., Igarashi, T., Miller, G. (Apr. 14, 2008)

Computer Graphics Forum (Proc. Eurographics), 27(2), 2008

Coherent Layer Peeling for Transparent High-depth-Complexity Scenes

Carr, N., Měch, R., Miller, G. (Feb. 7, 2008)

In Proceedings of the 23rd ACM SIGGRAPH/EUROGRAPHICS Symposium on Graphics Hardware, 33-40

Manipulating Virtual Plants

Prusinkiewicz, P., Lane, B., Měch, R. (May. 22, 2007)

In Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Functional-Structural Plant Models , 24-1 – 24-4, 2007

Real-time image-based rendering using surface proxies and texture packing

Měch, R. (Feb. 16, 2003)

Journal of Graphics Tools , 8(4), 1–19, 2003

Hardware-accelerated real-time rendering of gaseous phenomena

Měch, R. (Feb. 1, 2001)

Journal of Graphics Tools , 6(3), 1–16, 2001

L-studio/cpfg: a software system for modeling plants

Prusinkiewicz, P., Karwowski, R., Měch, R., Hanan, J. (Feb. 15, 2000)

In AGTIVE '99: Proceedings of the International Workshop on Applications of Graph Transformations with Industrial Relevance , 457–464, 2000

An L-System-based plant modeling language

Prusinkiewicz, P., Hanan, J., Měch, R. (Feb. 1, 2000)

In AGTIVE '99: Proceedings of the International Workshop on Applications of Graph Transformations with Industrial Relevance , 395–410, 2000

3D architectural modelling of aerial photomorphogenesis in white clover (Trifolium repens L.) using L-systems

Gautier, H., Měch, R., Prusinkiewicz, P., Varlet-Grancher, C. (Jan. 28, 2000)

Annals of Botany , 85, 359-370(12), 2000

Realistic modeling and rendering of plant ecosystems

Deussen, O., Hanrahan, P., Lintermann, B., Měch, R., Pharr, M., Prusinkiewicz, P. (Aug. 3, 1998)

In Proceedings of SIGGRAPH '98 , 275–286, 1998

Visual models of plant development

Prusinkiewicz, P., Hammel, M., Hanan, J., Měch, R. (Jan. 3, 1997)

Handbook of formal languages, vol. 3: beyond words, Springer-Verlag New York, Inc, 535–597, 1997

Visual models of plants interacting with their environment

Měch, R., Prusinkiewicz, P. (Aug. 5, 1996)

In Proceedings of SIGGRAPH '96 , 397–410, 1996

Synthetic topiary

Prusinkiewicz, P., James, M., Měch, R. (Feb. 15, 1994)

In Proceedings of SIGGRAPH '94 , 351–358, 1994

Colors in rendering algorithms: quality enhancing methods in ray-tracing

Měch, R. (Jun. 15, 1993)

Masters Thesis, The Charles University