Marcel Campen is presented with the Eurographics Young Researcher Award 2020 in recognition of his outstanding contributions to Computer Graphics in the area of 3D Geometry Processing.
Marcel received his doctoral degree from RWTH Aachen University in 2014. His thesis was titled “Quad Layouts – Generation and Optimization of Conforming Quadrilateral Surface Partitions”. After continuing his research as a postdoc at the Courant Institute at New York University and at RWTH Aachen from 2015-2017, he joined Osnabrück University as a professor in 2017.Marcel has made profound contributions in various topics in 3D Geometry Processing, including surface and volume parameterization, meshing, and surface vector field processing, and some of his most significant results are highlighted here. A major focus of Marcel’s research has been on quad meshing. This starts with his work on dual loops to obtain quad layouts on manifolds, which builds on the ingenious idea of carefully constructing the layout graph’s combinatorial dual. Marcel followed up this work with many other elegant contributions such as performing quad meshing with integer-grid maps, level-of-detail, conforming partitions, or user interaction.
Another focus of his research has been on surface parameterization. In one of his earlier contributions, he introduced an elegant approach to obtain quantized or integral global surface parameterizations that are guaranteed to produce valid results. This was an important improvement over previous methods that suffered from robustness and efficiency issues. He subsequently built on these ideas to develop further contributions such as seamless parameterization techniques for surfaces with free boundaries or arbitrary genus, and distortion-minimizing maps between surfaces, just to name a few. All of this work stands out for how it leverages solid mathematical formulations and proofs to develop practical algorithms for important geometry processing problems.
The results of Marcel’s research have been widely published in the premier computer graphics conferences and journals such as SIGGRAPH, SIGGRAPH Asia, and Eurographics. In addition, he has won two best paper awards for publications at the Symposium on Geometry Processing in 2010 and 2013, respectively. With his profound work on various problems in geometry processing, Marcel serves as an inspiration for the entire field.
Eurographics is pleased to recognize Marcel Campen with the 2020 Young Researcher Award.