Vision, Imaging, and Simulation for Heat and Light

SIGGRAPH Asia 2025 course

teaser
Light and Heat are different forms of energy that exist all around us and are constantly interchanging. (Top) Light that gets absorbed, becomes heat and gets transferred through conduction, convection and thermal radiation, where the latter is nothing but light of different wavelengths. (Bottom) Correctly modeling these physical phenomena opens up new capabilities across Vision, Imaging, and Simulation domains.

Presenters

Mani Ramanagopal
Mani Ramanagopal
Carnegie Mellon University
Bailey Miller
Bailey Miller
Carnegie Mellon University

Description

This short course explores how heat and light work together across Vision, Imaging, and Simulation domains. These phenomena are fundamentally coupled — absorbed light heats materials, while hotter objects radiate more thermal energy as infrared light — yet computer vision and imaging typically ignore heat, while engineering focuses only on thermal effects without considering light.

We show how accounting for both heat and light opens new possibilities. Measuring absorbed light intensity enables solving image analysis problems that were previously impossible. Heat flow patterns reveal object shapes. Multi-spectral thermal cameras can separate what objects reflect versus what they emit. These applications rely on thermal cameras that operate fundamentally differently from visible light cameras — using bolometric rather than photoelectric sensing — creating unique challenges in motion deblurring and noise modeling that we address.

These new vision and imaging capabilities demand equally novel simulation tools. The simulation component introduces Monte Carlo methods for thermal phenomena, showing how walk-on-spheres algorithms enable grid-free heat conduction simulation on complex geometry. These methods work together to handle both light and heat processes, enabling complete thermal simulation with potential applications in hardware design, synthetic dataset generation, and real-world scene analysis.

This course targets computer vision, graphics, and imaging researchers wanting to work beyond visible light. Participants will learn basic theory and practical techniques for heat-light interactions, understanding state-of-the-art developments and opening new research directions at the intersection of thermal vision, imaging, and physics-based simulation.

Agenda

Times are approximate. Slides for each course section are available below.

Time (PT)TopicPresenter
4:00 - 4:10 pmWhat is Light and Heat? Why study it?Mani Ramanagopal
4:10 - 4:40 pmVision with Heat and LightMani Ramanagopal
4:40 - 4:55 pmPhysics of Thermal ImagingMani Ramanagopal
4:55- 5:25 pmMonte Carlo Thermal SimulationBailey Miller
5:25 - 5:45 pmConclusion and Q & AMani Ramanagopal

Slides

PDF version of the slides used in the course are available here. The archival copy of the course notes are available on the ACM Digital Library.

Quiz

A mini-quiz to test your learning is available here.

References

The following is a list of references to papers we highlight in each section of the course. It is not an exhaustive, or even representative, bibliography for the corresponding research areas. For pointers to additional resources, we recommend perusing the bibliography of these references.

Background

Vision with Heat and Light

Physics of Thermal Imaging

Monte Carlo Thermal Simulation

Sponsors

The research presented in this course was supported in part by the NSF-NIFA AI Institute of Resilient Agriculture (AIIRA), National Institute of Food and Agriculture (2023-67021-39073), Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (FG202013153), Packard Fellowship, NSF (IIS-2107236, 2504890, 2212290, 1943123, 1900849, 2008123, DGE2140739), Nvidia Graduate Research Fellowship, Tata Consultancy Services Presidential Fellowship, Ford Motor Company via the Ford-UM Alliance (N022884), and gifts from Adobe Systems, nTopology, and Disney Research.