Nathon Lee

I’m nathon-lee, a developer passionate about open source and technology exploration, This site showcases my work, experiments, and learnings in software development and technical practice. Lens Blur, HDR+, VR, Portrait Mode, Portrait Light, Maps, and Shopping. I did my PhD at UC Berkeley, where I was advised by Jitendra Malik. I've received the PAMI Young Researcher Award.

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profile photo

Research

I'm interested in computer vision, deep learning, generative AI, and image processing. Most of my research is about inferring the physical world (shape, motion, color, light, etc) from images, usually with radiance fields. Some papers are highlighted.

Radiance Meshes for Volumetric Reconstruction
Alexander Mai, Trevor Hedstrom, George Kopanas,
Janne Kontkanen, Falko Kuester, Jonathan T. Barron
arXiv, 2025
project page / arXiv

Parameterizing a scene with a Delaunay tetrahedralization and a neural field yields a scene representation that is accurate, fast to render, easy to edit, and backwards-compatible.

NeRF-Casting: Improved View-Dependent Appearance with Consistent Reflections
Dor Verbin, Pratul Srinivasan, Peter Hedman, Benjamin Attal,
Ben Mildenhall, Richard Szeliski, Jonathan T. Barron
SIGGRAPH Asia, 2024
project page / arXiv

Carefully casting reflection rays lets us synthesize photorealistic specularities in real-world scenes.

Flash Cache: Reducing Bias in Radiance Cache Based Inverse Rendering
Benjamin Attal, Dor Verbin, Ben Mildenhall, Peter Hedman,
Jonathan T. Barron, Matthew O'Toole, Pratul P. Srinivasan
ECCV, 2024   (Oral Presentation)
project page / arXiv

A more physically-accurate inverse rendering system based on radiance caching for recovering geometry, materials, and lighting from RGB images of an object or scene.

Miscellanea

Micropapers

Squareplus: A Softplus-Like Algebraic Rectifier
A Convenient Generalization of Schlick's Bias and Gain Functions
Continuously Differentiable Exponential Linear Units
Scholars & Big Models: How Can Academics Adapt?

Teaching

Graduate Student Instructor, CS188 Spring 2011
Graduate Student Instructor, CS188 Fall 2010
Figures, "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach", 3rd Edition

Design and source code from Jon Barron's website