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Computer Vision Seminar: Dr. Elliott Wu, "From Pixels to 3D Motion: Modeling the Physical Natural World from Images."
- Event Type
- Seminar/Symposium
- Sponsor
- Siebel School of Computing and Data Science
- Virtual
- Join online
- Date
- Dec 4, 2025 4:00 pm
- Speaker
- Dr. Elliott Wu
- Contact
- Allison Mette
- agk@illinois.edu
- Originating Calendar
- Siebel School Speakers Calendar
Abstract: Pixel-based generative models nowadays excel at producing visually compelling images and videos, yet they often struggle to preserve underlying physical properties such as shape, motion, and material. Bridging visual and physical modeling could unlock tremendous opportunities across real-world engineering applications, from robotics, interactive VR, design, and manufacturing, to scientific domains such as biological and medical analysis. Inferring physically grounded 3D motion and dynamics from pixels thus becomes a key stepping stone toward these goals.
In this talk, I will present our recent efforts on developing data-driven methods for recovering 3D shape and motion from 2D images and videos, in both unsupervised and supervised settings. The resulting model turns a single image of a natural object, including everyday items and wildlife, into an animatable 3D asset instantly in a feed-forward fashion, enabling efficient and controllable 3D animation for entertainment and analysis.
Bio: Elliott (Shangzhe) Wu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge. He received his PhD from the University of Oxford, advised by Andrea Vedaldi and Christian Rupprecht, and worked as a postdoc at Stanford University with Jiajun Wu. His research focuses on 3D computer vision and inverse graphics. His work received several awards, including the Best Paper Award at CVPR 2020, the BMVA Sullivan Doctoral Thesis Prize, and the ELLIS PhD Award.