Valentin Deschaintre receives the EUROGRAPHICS Young Researcher Award 2025. Valentin’s research focuses on inverse rendering and appearance generation, acquisition, authoring and representations for virtual environments and scene understanding. His work covers many major contributions, including his seminal paper at SIGGRAPH 2018 on lightweight SVBRDF capture, which combined differential rendering with synthetic training data. The latter is now a standard for training and benchmarking.
Valentin worked on his PhD in Computer Science at INRIA Sophia-Antipolis, in collaboration with the Ansys affiliate Optis. His thesis received the French Computer Graphics Thesis Award and the UCA Academic Excellence Thesis Award. He continued his research at Imperial College London in 2020 before joining Adobe Research in 2021. In 2024, he was elected a EUROGRAPHICS Junior Fellow.
Valentin developed several important contributions in the context of data-driven appearance acquisition and authoring, published in top venues and journals of Computer Graphics and Vision: acquisition of large surfaces (EGSR 2020), polarization-based acquisition (CVPR 2021), procedural material models creation (SIGGRAPH 2022, 2023 and 2024), material authoring and generation (EGSR 2022, SIGGRAPH Asia 2022, SIGGRAPH 2023 and 2024), material perception (SIGGRAPH 2023), and scene understanding (SIGGRAPH 2023 and 2024, SIGGRAPH Asia 2023). In recent years, he published a series of papers contributing towards a complete pipeline for materials from acquisition, generation and description to selection, segmentation, editing and retrieval for textures, images and 3D assets.
Much of his work appeared in top venues and journals of Computer Graphics and Vision and many of his papers are highly cited. This shows the strong impact that his findings had on the community, in which Valentin plays an active role; he participated in program committees (EGSR 2021-2023, EUROGRAPHICS 2023, SIGGRAPH Asia 2023, 2024), and chaired events (SIGGRAPH Thesis FF and EG Doctoral Consortium). Further, he also successfully mentored and collaborated with various international PhD students.
EUROGRAPHICS is pleased to recognize Valentin Deschaintre with the 2025 Young Researcher Award in recognition of his outstanding contributions to Computer Graphics/Computer Vision in the area of data-driven material authoring and understanding methods.