Martijn Courteaux (IDLab-MEDIA) successfully defended his PhD on December 10, 2025. The thesis was supervised by Prof. Peter Lambert and Prof. Glenn Van Wallendael. The title of the PhD thesis is “Efficient Optimization and Rendering of Wide Mixture Models for Light Field Data”.
PhD Thesis Summary
The ongoing pursuit of larger, better, and faster also applies to multimedia: more pixels, more colors, more frames per second. Recently, this has expanded to include more freedom. With panoramic images and so-called 360° video, viewers can now look around, but true freedom of movement is still missing.
This is where light fields can bring innovation. Like a camera, light fields capture light, but not at a single point; instead, they sample light throughout a volume. This information can then be used to view a scene interactively with full freedom of movement.
This PhD dissertation introduces advances in the modeling and rendering of light fields through an innovative mathematical representation. The representation is continuous and geometrically interpretable, enabling powerful ways to manipulate and query light fields. The key manipulation developed in this work enables efficient rendering of light fields at interactive rates. In addition, a new light field dataset is presented to support the research.
Presentation
A recording of the defense can be watched below (or by clicking here. The defense starts at 07:13, and the presentation starts at 14:50. The presentation is in Dutch, about 50 minutes long and is understandable for both a non-expert and expert audience.
In the end of the recording, at 02:14:25, the chair of the examination board announced the final decision. The jury unanimously decided to grant Martijn Courteaux the academic degree of Doctor in Computer Science Engineering.
PhD thesis download link
An electronic version of the thesis (198 pages, 37 MB) can be found here. The thesis includes a high-level Dutch and English summary.
The cover of Martijn Courteaux’s PhD thesis
Publications
The presented work previously resulted in the following publications:
- Lightweight Implicit Approximation of the Minkowski Sum of an N-Dimensional Ellipsoid and Hyperrectangle (MDPI Mathematics)
- Dimensionality Reduction for the Real-Time Light-Field View Synthesis of Kernel-Based Models (MDPI Electronics)
- SILVR: A Synthetic Immersive Large-Volume Plenoptic Dataset (ACM MMSys 2022) For this work, Martijn won the Best Open Dataset and Software Paper Award.
- Progressive modeling of steered mixture-of-experts for light field video approximation (IEEE PCS 2018)
