Seminar Computergraphik SS'26
Seminar

Topic: Current Research in Computer Graphics

Content

In the Computer Graphics Seminar we discuss current research results in the field of Computer Graphics. The tasks of the participants are to write up a research report, to review the work of another student in writing, and to later revise and improve their own report to reflect the input gathered from the review. Finally, at the end of the semester and during a block-seminar, each student will give an oral presentation on their respective research reports. This must also be rehearsed beforehand in front of the assigned individual supervisor and their suggestions for improvement must be integrated.

Participants

The course is aimed at Bachelor's and Master's students in Computer Science (Informatik), IST, and Business Informatics (Wirtschaftsinformatik), as well as students pursuing their Master in Data Science.

The registration takes place centrally via StudIP. The number of participants is limited to 5 students.

Important Dates

All dates listed here must be adhered to. In order to successfully complete the module, it is mandatory to fullfill the deadlines, and attend ALL events in person.

• From 05.03.2026 to 17.03.2026: Registration process via Stud.IP
• Until 01.04.2026: Submission of topic requests
• 10.04.2026, 11:30: Kick-Off Meeting (G30, ICG)
• 21.04.2026: End of the deregistration period 
• 05.05.2026: Submission of the written paper
• 19.05.2026: Submission of the review report
• 02.06.2026: Submission of the revised paper
• Until 26.06.2026: Trial presentation
• 02.07.2026: Submission of the presentation slides
• 03.07.2026, 09:00 - 11:00: Presentations - Block Event
• 10.07.2026, 09:00 - 11:00: Presentations - Block Event Part 2

Registered students have the possibility to deregister until 2 weeks after the start of the lectures (i.e., 21.04.26) at the latest. For a successful deregistration, it is necessary to deregister via e-mail with the seminar supervisor (seminar@cg.cs.tu-bs.de).

Registered students, and students on the waiting list, have the possibility to send their top 3 topic requests in order of preference via email to seminar@cg.cs.tu-bs.de until the 01.04.26, so that they will be considered for the topic assignment.

Once a topic has been assigned to the student, all consequent submissions have to be sent by mail to the respective advisor and additionally to seminar@cg.cs.tu-bs.de. If not communicated otherwise, the deadline for all submissions is at 23:59 on the due day.

The respective drop-offs are done by email to seminar@cg.cs.tu-bs.de and if necessary by email to the respective advisor.

If you have any questions about the course, please contact seminar@cg.cs.tu-bs.de.

Format

• The final assignation of topics will be communicated during the Kick-Off event.
• For each topic, the student needs to prepare a report in latex using the ICG Template.
  The content of the report is a short summary of the work in one's own words and the elaboration of the main points, with a minimum length of 8 pages. The report should clearly reflect that the topic has been understood and was critically assessed.
• Each participant will later write a 1-2 page review on the report of another student (assigned by the seminar's supervisor). For writing the review one should pay particular attention to the comprehensibility and linguistic style of the summary.
• After receiving the review on one's own paper, the student will need to revise and improve their manuscript according to the received feedback.
• For the final presentations, the students can either use their own laptops or one provided by the Institute. If the student needs to use the ICG laptop, they need to contact seminar@cg.cs.tu-bs.de in time, at least two weeks before the presentations.
• The topics will be presented in approximately 20 minute presentations followed by a discussion.
• The language for the presentations can be either German or English.
• The oral presentation, the written paper, and the preparation of the review report, are all mandatory requirements to pass the course successfully.
  

Files and Templates

• Latex-Template Its use is compulsory.
• Slides-Template Using this template is recommended but not mandatory.
• Review-Template (mandatory usage)
• Kick-Off Slides

Tips on How to Give a Talk:

•    Giving a research talk. Short pdf with recommendations by Fredo Durand (MIT CSAIL)

•    How to give a talk (that doesn't put your audience to sleep). Slides by Ramesh Raskar (MIT Media Lab)

Topics

1. VGGT: Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer
   Jianyuan Wan, Minghao Chen, Nikita Karaev, Andrea Vedaldi, Christian Rupprech, David Novotny
   CVPR 2025
   Advisor: Florian Hahlbohm
   
   
   

2. ActiveSplat: High-Fidelity Scene Reconstruction through Active Gaussian Splatting
   Yuetao Li, Zijia Kuang, Ting Li, Qun Hao, Zike Yan, Guyue Zhou, Shaohui Zhang
   IEEE RA-L 2025
   Advisor: Junbo Li
   
   Active Scene Reconstruction is an interdisciplinary research area that focuses on solving viewpoint selection and scene reconstruction problems simultaneously. The primary objective is to attain a high coverage rate and superior reconstruction quality of the explored scene. 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) is a prevalent technique that has the capacity to reconstruct a scene with remarkable speed while preserving optimal quality. The present paper proposes a novel approach that utilizes high-speed and high-quality rendering from 3DGS and integrates it into the active scene reconstruction pipeline, in conjunction with Voronoi-graph-based path planning. This innovative integration results in state-of-the-art reconstruction outcomes.
   
   

3. VR-Splatting: Foveated Radiance Field Rendering via 3D Gaussian Splatting and Neural Points
   Linus Franke, Laura Fink, Marc Stamminger
   i3D 2025 / Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques
   Advisor: Timon Scholz
   
   Recent advances in radiance field techniques enable high-quality reconstruction and rendering of photorealistic environments. However, interactive exploration of such scenes at high resolutions and frame rates, such as required by VR, remains elusive without sacrificing quality. This paper proposes to combine a high-quality and low-quality reconstruction of the scene using two different methods to achieve fast rendering. Utilizing foveated rendering techniques, the high-quality reconstruction only needs to be rendered where the user is looking, whereas peripheral regions are rendered using the low-quality reconstruction to save performance without affecting perceptual quality.
   
   

4. Neural Two‐Level Monte Carlo Real‐Time Rendering
   Mikhail Dereviannykh, Dmitrii Klepikov, Johannes Hanika, Carsten Dachsbacher
   Computer Graphics Forum 2025
   Advisor: Felix Lehner
   
   This paper introduces a Two-Level Monte Carlo renderer using a novel Neural Incident Radiance Cache (NIRC) for rendering of scenes with global illumination. By using the NIRC, this method needs upto 25 times less compute time compared to full path tracing approaches.
   
   
   

5. Light of Normals: Unified Feature Representation for Universal Photometric Stereo
   Houyuan Chen, Hong Li, Chongjie Ye, Zhaoxi Chen, Bohan Li, Shaocong Xu, Xianda Guo, Xuhui Liu, Yikai Wang, Baochang Zhang, Satoshi Ikehata, Boxin Shi, Anyi Rao, Hao Zhao
   ICLR 2026 / International Conference on Learning Representations
   Advisor: JP Tauscher

This paper recovers the precise surface geometry of objects from photos taken under unknown, varying lighting conditions. It introduces a framework that explicitly separates lighting information from shape information to understand what an object looks like independent of how it is lit.

Advisors

Florian Hahlbohm

Junbo Li

Timon Scholz

Felix Lehner

JP Tauscher

Susana Castillo