Alankar Kotwal

I am a research scientist in neurosurgery with Dr. Pablo Valdes at the University of Texas Medical Branch, and a researcher with Prof. Ashok Veeraraghavan at Rice University.

I obtained my PhD in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University advised by Prof. Ioannis Gkioulekas and Prof. Anat Levin.

Before that, I received my Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Electrical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, where I worked with Prof. Ajit Rajwade and Prof. Suyash Awate.

E-mail / CV / Scholar / LinkedIn / LENS / Imaging @ CMU

that's me

Research summary

I work in computational imaging, where we combine illumination, sensing and computation in innovative ways to extract information from the environment in a way that a traditional camera cannot. My current work applies the principles of computational imaging to improve visual feedback in neurosurgery.

My PhD work involved building optical imaging systems that use the wave nature of light to achieve exciting capabilities such as seeing through scattering media and micron-scale depth acquisition, with applications in biomedical imaging and industrial fabrication. Some of these are possible only in the lab now: We brought them out in the open! For more on our work on interferometric imaging, please see our SIGGRAPH course.


Projects
passive

SIGGRAPH 2023 course on Computational Interferometric Imaging
Alankar Kotwal, Florian Willomitzer and Ioannis Gkioulekas
ACM SIGGRAPH 2023 Courses
link | project page | recording | slides | SIGGRAPH blog feature!

passive

Passive Micron-scale Time-of-Flight with Sunlight Interferometry
Alankar Kotwal, Anat Levin and Ioannis Gkioulekas
IEEE/CVF Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023
paper | project page | poster | video | optical setup

swi

Swept-Angle Synthetic Wavelength Interferometry
Alankar Kotwal, Anat Levin and Ioannis Gkioulekas
IEEE/CVF Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023
paper | project page | poster | video | optical setup

cmii

Interferometric Transmission Probing with Coded Mutual Intensity
Alankar Kotwal, Anat Levin and Ioannis Gkioulekas
ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH), 2020
paper | project page | video | optical setup

msct

Signal Sensing and Reconstruction Paradigms for a Multi-Source Static Computed Tomography System
Alankar Kotwal, Avilash Cramer, Dufan Wu, Kai Yang, Wolfgang Krull, Ioannis Gkioulekas and Rajiv Gupta
IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, 2020
paper

projection

Designing constrained projections for compressed sensing: mean errors and anomalies with coherence
Dhruv Shah, Alankar Kotwal and Ajit Rajwade
IEEE Global Conference on Signal and Information Processing, 2018
paper | code

desmoking2

Joint desmoking, specularity removal, and denoising of laparoscopy images via graphical models and Bayesian inference
Ayush Baid, Alankar Kotwal, Riddhish Bhalodia, Shabbir N. Merchant and Suyash P. Awate
IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging, 2017
paper | code

desmoking1

Joint desmoking and denoising of laparoscopy images
Alankar Kotwal, Riddhish Bhalodia and Suyash P. Awate
IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging, 2016
paper | code

compressed-mse

Optimizing matrices for compressed sensing using existing goodness measures: negative results, and an alternative
Alankar Kotwal and Ajit Rajwade
arXiv:1707.03355 [cs.IT], 2017
pre-print | code | thesis

coherence-optimization

Optimizing codes for source separation in color image demosaicing and compressive video recovery
Alankar Kotwal and Ajit Rajwade
arXiv:1609.02135 [cs.CV], 2017
pre-print | code | thesis


Other projects
rover

Optimizing nanoparticles for efficient photothermal therapy
with Prof. Maysam Chamanzar, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University
Nano-Bio-Photonics course project, Spring 2020

rover

The IIT Bombay Mars Rover project
project page | report

photoz

Estimating cosmological photometric redshifts with machine learning
with Prof. Robert Brunner, Astrophysics, Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Google Summer of Code, 2014
code

ptychography

Fourier ptychography for histological eye section imaging
L. V. Prasad Eye Hospital, Hyderabad, India
Winter internship, 2014

variability

Star variability analysis to detect exoplanets in NGC2419
National Initiative on Undergraduate Sciences (Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, India)
Winter project, 2015
report | code

xray

An X-ray study of black hole candidate X Norma X-1
National Initiative on Undergraduate Sciences (Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, India)
Winter project, 2013
report

processors

FPGA-based pipelined RISC microprocessors implementing two architectures
Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay
Microprocessors course project, 2014
lca-processor code | lc-3b-processor code


Last updated July 2023. Thanks, Jon Barron, for the template!