DRF Lunchtime Clinic - Dr Elliott (Shangzhe) Wu

The DRF Lunchtime Clinic is delighted to welcome Dr Elliott (Shangzhe) Wu, Assistant Professor in the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge, who will join us to talk about From Pixels to 3D Motion: Modeling the Physical Natural World from Images.

Abstract
Pixel-based generative models nowadays excel at producing visually compelling images and videos, yet they often struggle to preserve underlying physical properties such as shape, motion, and material. Bridging visual and physical modeling could unlock tremendous opportunities across real-world engineering applications, from robotics, interactive VR, design, and manufacturing, to scientific domains such as biological and medical analysis. Inferring physically grounded 3D motion and dynamics from pixels thus becomes a key stepping stone toward these goals.
This talk presents recent research on data-driven approaches for recovering 3D shape and motion from 2D images and videos, in both supervised and unsupervised settings. The resulting models turn a single image of a natural object, including everyday items and wildlife, into an animatable 3D asset instantly in a feed-forward fashion, enabling efficient and controllable 3D simulation for entertainment and robotics.
 

Bio
Elliott (Shangzhe) Wu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge. He received his PhD from the University of Oxford, advised by Andrea Vedaldi and Christian Rupprecht, and worked as a postdoc at Stanford University with Jiajun Wu. His research focuses on 3D computer vision and inverse graphics. His work received several awards, including the Best Paper Award at CVPR 2020, the BMVA Sullivan Doctoral Thesis Prize, and the ELLIS PhD Award.