Publications by Wenzel Alban Jakob

The Mokume Dataset and Inverse Modeling of Solid Wood Textures

We present the Mokume dataset for solid wood texturing consisting of 190 cube-shaped samples of various hard and softwood species documented by high-resolution exterior photographs, annual ring annotations, and volumetric computed tomography (CT) scans. A ...

Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)2025

Radiance Surfaces: Optimizing Surface Representations with a 5D Radiance Field Loss

Wenzel Alban Jakob, Nicolas Julien Roussel, Tizian Lucien Zeltner, Merlin Eléazar Nimier-David

We present a fast and simple technique to convert images into a radiance surface-based scene representation. Building on existing radiance volume reconstruction algorithms, we introduce a subtle yet impactful modification of the loss function requiring cha ...

ACM2025

A Simple Approach to Differentiable Rendering of SDFs

Wenzel Alban Jakob

We present a simple algorithm for differentiable rendering of surfaces represented by Signed Distance Fields (SDF), which makes it easy to integrate rendering into gradient-based optimization pipelines. To tackle visibility-related derivatives that make re ...

ACM Association for Computing Machinery2024

MCMC: Bridging Rendering, Optimization and Generative AI

Wenzel Alban Jakob

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has made unprecedented advances in vision language models over the past two years. These advances are largely due to diffusion-based generative models, which are very stable and simple to train. These diffusion model ...

Association for Computing Machinery, Inc2024

Prism-PET II: Second prototype of the TOF-DOI Prism-PET brain scanner with tapered crystals and inverse rendering reconstruction

Wenzel Alban Jakob, Baptiste Alexandre Marie Philippe Claude Nicolet

Accurate PET quantification of tracer uptake in small brain structures is confounded by low sensitivity and the partial volume effect (PVE) caused by limited spatial resolution. In this study, we present the second prototype of the Prism-PET brain scanner ...

IEEE2024

Inverse Rendering for Tomographic Volumetric Additive Manufacturing

Christophe Moser, Wenzel Alban Jakob, Jorge Andres Madrid Wolff, Felix Wechsler, Baptiste Alexandre Marie Philippe Claude Nicolet

Tomographic Volumetric Additive Manufacturing (TVAM) is an emerging 3D printing technology that can create complex objects in under a minute. The key idea is to project intense light patterns onto a rotating vial of photo-sensitive resin, causing polymeriz ...

2024

Inverse Rendering for PET Image Reconstruction

Wenzel Alban Jakob, Baptiste Alexandre Marie Philippe Claude Nicolet

Differentiable rendering (DR) is an emerging field that facilitates the calculation and propagation of gradients of 3D objects through images. In contrast to deep neural networks (DNNs), which generally lack the understanding of 3D objects that form the im ...

IEEE2024

Solving Inverse PDE Problems using Grid-Free Monte Carlo Estimators

Wenzel Alban Jakob

Partial differential equations can model diverse physical phenomena including heat diffusion, incompressible flows, and electrostatic potentials. Given a description of an object's boundary and interior, traditional methods solve such PDEs by densely meshi ...

2024

Inverse Rendering for PET Scanner Calibration

Wenzel Alban Jakob, Yu Lin

The significant degradation of reconstructed image resolution and the presence of apparent artifacts can result from sub-millimetric misalignment of scanner configuration in highspatial resolution positron emission tomography (PET) systems. Therefore, ensu ...

IEEE2024

Projective Sampling for Differentiable Rendering of Geometry

Wenzel Alban Jakob, Nicolas Julien Roussel

Discontinuous visibility changes at object boundaries remain a persistent source of difficulty in the area of differentiable rendering. Left untreated, they bias computed gradients so severely that even basic optimization tasks fail.|Prior path-space metho ...

2023