Sylvain’s work mainly focuses on extracting information from real images. The goal is to obtain data useful for computer graphics, i.e. suitable for rendering new images. During his PhD with François Sillion, Sylvain developed new solutions to face relighting, shape reconstruction from image sequences, and for recovery of the 3D geometry of hair. The main results of this work are an optimal complexity algorithm for acquiring precise 3D models from several photographs, and a technique that exploits a video sequence to build a dense set of 3D curves that match someone’s hairstyle.
Since his post-doc at MIT with Frédo Durand, Sylvain has been interested in computational photography. He is looking at signal-processing techniques to apply them to digital photographs. Compared to traditional film photography, this unveils a large spectrum of possibilities to modify and enhance the picture content. Conversely, photography-related applications raise specific issues such as user interaction and photorealism, and cast a new light upon known signal-processing methods.