Luca Surace

This website is intended as a half way between a personal page and a blog. Other than content on computer science, it is going to contain flashes of various topics.

Research

I work in the Perception, Display and Fabrication group led by Prof. Piotr Didyk. My PhD is supported by ERC Starting Grant, PERDY project. Broadly, my research focuses on leveraging the knowledge of human visual system to optimize graphics content in terms of both quality and efficiency.
Specifically, I have worked on - foveated rendering (image / geometry); - display modeling (luminance / color). Before coming in Switzerland, I worked on the Air-Cobot project and obtained a MSc from University of Calabria (Italy) with a thesis focusing on emotion recognition (University of Plymouth, UK).

News

• I gave a talk on foveated rendering at the 2024 Italian Conference on Game Development, Rome.
• Since June 2024, I am doing a three months internship at Walt Disney Research Studios, focusing on color perception.
• Our lab was featured on the Swiss news multiple times. You can check the articles from SwissInfo, Teleticino and Ticino Scienza.

Publications

Journal

Learning Foveated Reconstruction to Preserve Perceived Image Statistics

Luca Surace, Marek Wernikowski, Cara Tursun, Karol Myszkowski, Radosław Mantiuk, Piotr Didyk
Transaction on Applied Perception, 2023

Conference

Gaze-Contingent Perceptual Level of Detail Prediction

Luca Surace, Cara Tursun, Ufuk Çelikcan, Piotr Didyk
Eurographics Symposium on Rendering, 2023

Emotion Recognition in the wild using deep neural networks and Bayesian classifiers

Luca Surace, Massimiliano Patacchiola, Elena Battini Sonmez, William Spataro, Angelo Cangelosi
19th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI), 2017

S-rep model for fundus image analysis

Francesco Calimeri, Claudio Stamile, Luca Surace
IEEE International Symposium on Signal Processing and Information Technology (ISSPIT), 2017

Teaching

• FS 2019/2020 - FS 2022/2023: Computer Graphics

You will do cool things like ray-tracing, cloth simulation and the legendary rendering competition (2022, 2023).

• SS 2019/2020, SS 2021/2022: Computational Fabrication

When you print a 3D object, not everything goes well. To know why and how to solve the problems, as well as create a 3D model without a scanner, you should attend this course.

• SS 2020/2021: Algorithms & Data Structures

I guess you would like to know how to implement a bubble sort.

Bachelor Projects for USI Students

The objective of the bachelor's project is to develop an interactive tool for drawing 2D closed shapes. Each closed shape can be represented with a series of elliptic functions.
The higher the number of ellipses in the sequence, the more precise the approximation of the shape is (see the figure). The tool should, given the state of the current drawing:

• compute its representation;
• find similar shapes through comparison with several pre-computed representations of shapes;
• suggest the similar shapes to the artist;

no machine learning is required.
The tool should also have basic commands for drawing, such as pencil, pen, eraser, undo and redo. A similar system is Autodraw. Possible extensions are clearly possible.
If interested, please contact me at my USI email.