Paul Debevec

Paul Ernest Debevec is a researcher in computer graphics at the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies. He is best known for his work in finding, capturing and synthesizing the BSDF utilizing the light stages his research team constructed to find and capture the reflectance field over the human face, high dynamic range imaging and image-based modeling and rendering.

Debevec received his undergraduate degree in mathematics and engineering from the University of Michigan, and a Ph.D. in computer science from University of California, Berkeley in 1996; his thesis research was in photogrammetry, or the recovery of the 3D shape of an object from a collection of still photographs taken from various angles. In 1997 he and a team of students produced The Campanile Movie (1997), a virtual flyby of UC Berkeley's Campanile tower. Debevec's more recent research has included methods for recording real-world illumination for use in computer graphics; a number of novel inventions for recording ambient and incident light have resulted from the work of Debevec and his team, including the light stage, of which five or more versions have been constructed, each an evolutionary improvement over the previous.

Techniques based on Debevec's work have been used in several major motion pictures, including The Matrix (1999), Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions (2003) Spider-Man 2 (2004), King Kong (2005), Superman Returns (2006), Spider-Man 3 (2007), and Avatar (2009).

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