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Marc Levoy | |
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| Born | (1953-11-02)November 2, 1953 (age 72) |
| Alma mater | Cornell University University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill |
| Known for | Volume rendering Light fields 3D scanning Stanford Bunny Computational photography |
| Awards | SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award (1996),ACM Fellow (2007),National Academy of Engineering (2022) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Computer Graphics,Computer Vision |
| Institutions | Stanford University Google,Adobe Inc. |
| Thesis | Display of Surfaces From Volume Data (1989) |
| Doctoral advisor | Henry Fuchs |
Marc Stewart Levoy (bornNovember 2, 1953) is an Americancomputer graphics researcher and Professor Emeritus ofComputer Science andElectrical Engineering atStanford University, a vice president and Fellow atAdobe Inc., and (until 2020) a Distinguished Engineer atGoogle. He is noted for pioneering work involume rendering,light fields, andcomputational photography.
Levoy first studied computer graphics as anarchitecture student underDonald P. Greenberg atCornell University. He received his B.Arch. in 1976 and M.S. in architecture in 1978. He developed a 2Dcomputer animation system as part of his studies, receiving the Charles Goodwin Sands Memorial Medal for this work. Greenberg and he suggested toDisney that they use computer graphics in producing animated films, but the idea was rejected by several of theNine Old Men who were still active. Following this, they were able to convinceHanna-Barbera Productions to use their system for television animation. Despite initial opposition by animators, the system was successful in reducing labor costs and helping to save the company, and was used until 1996.[1] Levoy worked as director of the Hanna-Barbera Animation Laboratory from 1980 to 1983.
He then did graduate study in computer science underHenry Fuchs at theUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and received his Ph.D. in 1989. While there, he published several important papers in the field of volume rendering, developing new algorithms (such as volumeray tracing), improving efficiency, and demonstrating applications of the technique.[2]
He joined the faculty of Stanford's Computer Science Department in 1990. In 1991, he received theNational Science Foundation's Presidential Young Investigator Award. In 1994, he co-created theStanford Bunny, which has become an icon of computer graphics. In 1996, he andPat Hanrahan coauthored the paper, "Light Field Rendering," which forms the basis behind many image-based rendering techniques in modern-day computer graphics. His lab also worked on applications oflight fields, developing technologies such as alight-field camera andlight-field microscope, and oncomputational photography.
The phrase "computational photography" was first used bySteve Mann in 1995.[citation needed] It was re-coined and given a broader meaning by Levoy for a course he taught at Stanford in 2004[3] and a symposium he co-organized in 2005.[4]
Levoy took a leave of absence from Stanford in 2011 to work atGoogleX as part ofProject Glass. In 2014, he retired from Stanford to become full-time at Google, where until 2020 he led a team in Google Research[5] that worked broadly on cameras and photography.
One of his projects was HDR+ mode[6] for Google Pixel smartphones.[7] In 2016, the French agency DxO gave the Pixel the highest rating ever given to a smartphone camera,[8] and again in 2017 for the Pixel 2.[9] His team also developed Portrait Mode, a single-camera background defocus technology launched in October 2017 on Pixel 2,[10] and Night Sight, a technology for taking handheld pictures without flash in very low light launched in November 2018 on all generations of Pixel phones.[11]
His team worked on underlying technologies for Project Jump,[12] a 360 degree camera that captures stereo panoramic videos forVR headsets.[13]
Although Levoy no longer teaches at Stanford, a course he taught on digital photography[14] that was rerecorded at Google in 2016 is available online for free.[15]
Levoy left Google in March 2020 and joinedAdobe Inc. as vice president and fellow in July.[16] In 2024 his Adobe team launched technologies for automatically adjusting tone and color in HDR photographs[17] and for removing reflections from windows.[18] In 2025 his team launched an experimental computational photography camera app called Project indigo.[19]
For his work in volume rendering, Levoy was the recipient of theACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award in 1996.[2] In 2007, he was inducted as a Fellow of theAssociation for Computing Machinery "for contributions to computer graphics".[20] In 2022 he was elected to theNational Academy of Engineering "for contributions to computer graphics and digital photography".[21]
[s] - Reprinted inMary C. Whitton, ed. (2023).Seminal Graphics Papers: Pushing the Boundaries, Volume 2. ACM.doi:10.1145/3596711.ISBN 979-8-4007-0897-8. (August, 2023)
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