Paul Ernest Debevec is a researcher incomputer graphics at theUniversity of Southern California'sInstitute for Creative Technologies. He is best known for his work in finding, capturing and synthesizing thebidirectional scattering distribution function utilizing thelight stages his research team constructed to find and capture thereflectance field over thehumanface,high-dynamic-range imaging andimage-based modeling and rendering.
Debevec received his undergraduate degree in mathematics and engineering from theUniversity of Michigan, and aPh.D. incomputer science fromUniversity of California, Berkeley in 1996; his thesis research was inphotogrammetry, or the recovery of the 3D shape of an object from a collection of stillphotographs taken from various angles.[1] In 1997 he and a team of students producedThe Campanile Movie (1997), a virtual flyby of UC Berkeley'sCampanile tower. Debevec's more recent research has included methods for recording real-world illumination for use in computer graphics; a number of novel inventions for recording ambient and incident light have resulted from the work of Debevec and his team, including the light stage, of which five or more versions have been constructed, each an evolutionary improvement over the previous.
Techniques based on Debevec's work have been used in several majormotion pictures, includingThe Matrix (1999),The Matrix Reloaded andThe Matrix Revolutions (2003)Spider-Man 2 (2004),King Kong (2005),Superman Returns (2006),Spider-Man 3 (2007), andAvatar (2009).
In addition Debevec and his team produced several short films that have premiered atSIGGRAPH's annual Electronic Theater, including Fiat Lux (1999) andThe Parthenon (2004).
Debevec, along with Tim Hawkins, John Monos and Mark Sagar, was awarded a 2010 Scientific and Engineering Award from theAcademy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for the design and engineering of the Light Stage capture devices and the image-based facial rendering system developed for character relighting in motion pictures.[2]
In 2002, he was named to theMITTechnology ReviewTR100 as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35.[3]
Some of his later work he presented to the SIGGRAPH convention in 2008 and 2013,Digital Emily[1] in association withImage Metrics andDigital Ira in association withActivision[4] respectively. Digital Emily shown in 2008 was a pre-computed simulation meanwhile Digital Ira ran in real-time in 2013 and is fairly realistic looking even inreal-timeanimation.
In June 2016, Debevec joinedGoogle's Virtual Reality group.[5]
In 2024 Debevec andCorridor Digital recreated thesodium vapor process, which had fallen out of use due to the difficulty in creating the necessarybeam splitter.[6]
