ECE Colloquium: Aswin Sankaranarayanan

ECE Colloquium: Aswin Sankaranarayanan

Title: Spatially Selective Lensing

Abstract: The lens is one of the most fundamental components of any machine vision system. Its basic operation is strikingly simple: gather cones of light from scene points on a plane at a fixed distance and bring them into sharp focus on a planar sensor. Simultaneously, points off the focus plane become defocused, with blur increasing proportionally to their distance from it. Despite remarkable advances in lens design and fabrication over the past few centuries, this core principle—increasing light capture while bringing part of a scene into sharp focus—has remained unchanged.

In this talk, I will introduce the concept of a spatially selective computational lens: one that can simultaneously focus different points on a focal plane array onto different depths. I will demonstrate its applications in 3D display design as well as flexible depth-of-field imaging.

Bio: Aswin Sankaranarayanan is a professor in the ECE Department at CMU. His research interests are broadly in computational photography, signal processing, and vision. He obtained his doctoral degree at the University of Maryland, where his dissertation won the Distinguished Dissertation Award from the ECE Department in 2009. Aswin is the recipient of best paper awards at SIGGRAPH 2023, ICCV 2025, and CVPR 2019, the NSF CAREER Award in 2017, and the Eta Kappa Nu Excellence in Teaching Award.