Varun Sundar

I am a first second third fourth year PhD student at the University of Wisconsin Madison, working with Mohit Gupta at the WISION Lab.

Previously, I was an undergraduate at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, where I obtained a bachelors degree in Electrical Engineering. At IIT Madras, I was associated with the Computational Imaging Lab, headed by Kaushik Mitra.

I spent the summer of 2019 working with Ram Nevatia at the University of Southern California. I've also been fortunate to be work with some amazing mentors, including Salaman Siddique and Arka Sadhu.

Email  /  CV  /  Google Scholar  /  Twitter  /  Github

I'm interested in computer vision, computational imaging and machine learning. Broadly, I wish to harness a conjuction of newer hardware and smarter algorithms to tackle a variety of problems. My undergraduate research focussed on developing deep learning techniques to recover high-quality images from lensless cameras.

• (Aug 1st, 24) Our single-photon demo was recognized with the "best in show" award at SIGGRAPH E-Tech!
• (Jul 19th, 24) Demoing single-photon applications at SIGGRAPH. Say hi if you're at Denver next week!
• (Feb 26th, 24) One first-authored paper accepted at CVPR! See you in Seattle!
• (Jul 13th, 23) One first-authored paper accepted at ICCV as an oral presentation!
• (Mar 28th, 23) One paper accepted at SIGGRAPH!
• (Mar 6th, 22) One first-authored paper accepted at CVPR. First paper of my PhD!
• (Mar 31st, 21) Our reproducibility work has been accepted for publication at Rescience-C!
• (Mar 30th, 21) Gave a talk at the W&B Salon on our reproducibility work.
• (Mar 26th, 21) Awarded UW CS summer RA-ship!
• (Feb 18th, 21) IITM featured a pop-sci style article on our lensless work!
• (Jan 25th, 21) Joining UW Madison for grad school!
• (Oct 16th, 20) Our work on lensless imaging has been accepted for publication in IEEE TPAMI!
• (Oct 16th, 20) We placed 2nd in the ECCV Under Display Camera Challenge (POLED track). Paper available on arxiv.
• (Aug 1st, 20) Graduated from IIT Madras!
• (Apr 15th, 20) Accepted to PhD programmes at UW Madison, CMU, USC, Rice University and UCLA!
• (May 17th, 19) I will be interning at Prof. Ram Nevatia's lab in USC till August 2019

A demonstration of single-photon imaging capabilities---including high-speed, high-dynamic range, and low-light vision---at SIGGRAPH's emerging technologies track.

Single-photon cameras can not only emulate event cameras, but also facilitate a generalized space of intensity-preserving event cameras.

Photon-level software-defined cameras can emulate a diverse range of imaging modalities.

Color filter and algorithm design for single-photon color imaging in low light.

Single-Photon Avalanche Diodes (SPADs) can be operated as extremely high-speed binary imagers and find a synergistic application in Structuered Light.

Reproducibility Report on the ICML 2020 paper "Rigging the Lottery: Making All Tickets Winners".

Deep Atrous Guided Filter for Image Restoration in Under Display Cameras
Varun Sundar*, Sumanth Hegde*, Divya K Raman, Kaushik Mitra.
ECCV RLQ-TOD Workshop, 2020
* denotes equal contribution.
project page / arXiv / video / bibtex

Guided Filters when incorporated in a deep network can efficiently recover severely degraded, mega-pixel resolution images.

FlatNet: Towards Photorealistic Scene Reconstruction from Lensless Measurements
Salman S. Khan*, Varun Sundar*, Vivek Boominathan, Ashok Veeraraghavan, Kaushik Mitra.
IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 2020
* denotes equal contribution.
project page / arXiv / video / bibtex

We propose a general learning based framework to recover photorealistic scenes from lensless captures for both separable and non-separable forward models.