Project Ideas in Visual Computing
This page lists some of my project ideas relating to visual computing (computer graphics, image processing and computer vision).
In the last three years, I have (co-)supervised 8 Part II projects: 4 got project prizes and on average they achieved 79 marks.
Please note that I will not be able to supervise any projects this year, as I have finished my PhD.
However, if you are interested, please get in touch and I may be able to suggest an alternative project supervisor.
Shader Compositor
The idea is to build a tool that lets one create a pipeline of shader effects in OpenGL which are previewed in real-time. Code and parameters can be changed at runtime and are compiled and updated on-the-fly. This would be similar to the OpenGL Shader Builder on Mac OS, just with several shaders chained together. One option would be to use WebGL to build a browser-based shader compositor that can be used on any computer, perhaps similar to fractal.io. If this works well, it would be tremendously useful, in particular for rapidly developing rendering effecs and teaching computer graphics. However, it also requires quite a bit of fairly hardcore coding.
Layered painterly rendering
A previous project extracted a layered image representation from images with depth, so that each object in a scene ‘lives’ in its own layer. This project will build on this representation and apply a painterly rendering style (or other styles) on a per-layer basis. The main advantage of this approach is that the result can be rendered coherently in stereo, so as to create a stereoscopic 3D painting.