Sam Hasinoff Principal Software Engineer Google Research 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View, CA 94043, USA (650) 429-8086 hasinoff@google.com
My research is in computational photography, with the broad goal of extending what's possible with conventional photography. Before joining Google in 2011, I was a Research Assistant Professor at TTIC. Before that, I was a postdoctoral fellow at MIT CSAIL, working with Frédo Durand and Bill Freeman. I received my Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Toronto in 2008, under the supervision of Kyros Kutulakos.  [Brief bio] [CV - Sep 2012] [Google scholar]

Products

The Google Camera app authors images using the new Ultra HDR image format introduced in Android 14. This format is backwards compatible, providing a more true-to-life rendering for HDR displays. Google Photos now supports HDR as well, preserving the HDR rendering when editing and upgrading legacy images to HDR. HDR photo editing with machine learning (Google Research blog, Oct 2024)

HDR+ in the Google Camera app improves image quality by capturing bursts of full-resolution images and merging them into a single result. Night Sight mode is also based on HDR+. Starting from Pixel 4, the viewfinder is WYSIWYG and supports live HDR editing. An early version of HDR+ ran on Google Glass. HDR+ with Bracketing on Pixel Phones (Google Research blog, Apr 2021) Live HDR+ and Dual Exposure Controls on Pixel 4 and 4a (Aug 2020) Astrophotography with Night Sight on Pixel Phones (Nov 2019) Night Sight: Seeing in the Dark on Pixel Phones (Nov 2018) Introducing the HDR+ Burst Photography Dataset (Oct 2018) HDR+: Low Light and High Dynamic Range photography in the Google Camera App (Oct 2014)

The controls for shadows, highlights, and clarity introduced in Lightroom 4 and Photoshop CS6 are inspired by our work on local Laplacian filters. Magic or Local Laplacian Filters? (Adobe Lightroom blog, Feb 2012)

Ph.D. Thesis

Variable-Aperture Photography
Dept. of Computer Science, University of Toronto, 2008
Alain Fournier Ph.D. Thesis Award

Publications

Mobile burst photography system [HDR+ project page] [Night Sight project page]

Handheld Mobile Photography in Very Low Light Orly Liba, Kiran Murthy, Yun-Ta Tsai, Tim Brooks, Tianfan Xue, Nikhil Karnad, Qiurui He, Jonathan T. Barron, Dillon Sharlet, Ryan Geiss, Samuel W. Hasinoff, Yael Pritch, and Marc Levoy ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. SIGGRAPH Asia 2019), 38(6), 16 pp. Burst photography for high dynamic range and low-light imaging on mobile cameras Samuel W. Hasinoff, Dillon Sharlet, Ryan Geiss, Andrew Adams, Jonathan T. Barron, Florian Kainz, Jiawen Chen, and Marc Levoy ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. SIGGRAPH Asia 2016), 35(6), 12 pp.

Learning fast image processing [project page]

Deep Bilateral Learning for Real-Time Image Enhancement Michaël Gharbi, Jiawen Chen, Jonathan T. Barron, Samuel W. Hasinoff, and Frédo Durand ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. SIGGRAPH 2017), 36(4), 10 pp.

Accelerating image processing operators

Bilateral Guided Upsampling Jiawen Chen, Andrew Adams, Neal Wadhwa, and Samuel W. Hasinoff ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. SIGGRAPH Asia 2016), 35(6), 8 pp.

Pyramid-based image processing [project page] [new project page]

Local Laplacian filters: edge-aware image processing with a Laplacian pyramid Sylvain Paris, Samuel W. Hasinoff, and Jan Kautz Communications of the ACM, 58(3), pp. 81-91, Mar 2015 Research Highlight; Cover story Fast Local Laplacian Filters: Theory and Applications Mathieu Aubry, Sylvain Paris, Samuel W. Hasinoff, Jan Kautz, and Frédo Durand ACM Transactions on Graphics (presented at SIGGRAPH 2014), 33(5), 15 pp. Local Laplacian Filters: Edge-aware Image Processing with a Laplacian Pyramid [low-res] Sylvain Paris, Samuel W. Hasinoff, and Jan Kautz ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. SIGGRAPH 2011), 30(4), 11 pp. Fast and Robust Pyramid-based Image Processing Mathieu Aubry, Sylvain Paris, Samuel W. Hasinoff, Jan Kautz, and Frédo Durand MIT technical report, November 2011 (MIT-CSAIL-TR-2011-049)

Laser speckle [project page]

Laser Speckle Photography for Surface Tampering Detection YiChang Shih, Abe Davis, Samuel W. Hasinoff, Frédo Durand, William T. Freeman Proc. 25th IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2012, pp. 33-40

Reflections on unmirrored geometry [project page]

Diffuse Reflectance Imaging with Astronomical Applications Samuel W. Hasinoff, Anat Levin, Philip R. Goode, and William T. Freeman Proc. 13th IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision, ICCV 2011, pp. 185-192

High ISO for noise reduction and efficient HDR [project page]

Noise-Optimal Capture for High Dynamic Range Photography Samuel W. Hasinoff, Frédo Durand, and William T. Freeman Proc. 23rd IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2010, pp. 553-560

Propagating edits over personal photo collections [project page]

Search-and-Replace Editing for Personal Photo Collections  (oral) Samuel W. Hasinoff, Martyna Jóźwiak, Frédo Durand, and William T. Freeman Proc. 2nd IEEE International Conference on Computational Photography, ICCP 2010, 8 pp.

Multiple exposures for more efficient photography [project page]

Time-Constrained Photography  (oral) Samuel W. Hasinoff, Kiriakos N. Kutulakos, Frédo Durand, and William T. Freeman Proc. 12th IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision, ICCV 2009, pp. 333-340

Depth of field extension using computational cameras [project page]

4D Frequency Analysis of Computational Cameras for Depth of Field Extension [extended TR] Anat Levin, Samuel W. Hasinoff, Paul Green, Frédo Durand, and William T. Freeman ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. SIGGRAPH 2009), 28(3), Article No. 97, 14 pp.

Large apertures for faster in-focus capture [project page]

Light-Efficient Photography [doi] Samuel W. Hasinoff and Kiriakos N. Kutulakos IEEE Trans. Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 33(11), pp. 2203-2214, 2011. Light-Efficient Photography  (oral) Samuel W. Hasinoff and Kiriakos N. Kutulakos Proc. 10th European Conference on Computer Vision, ECCV 2008, pp. 45-59 Focal Stack Photography: High-Performance Photography with a Conventional Camera Kiriakos N. Kutulakos and Samuel W. Hasinoff Proc. 11th IAPR Conference on Machine Vision Applications, MVA 2009, pp. 332-337 (invited paper)

High-resolution 3D reconstruction by controlling aperture and focus [project page]

Confocal Stereo [doi] Samuel W. Hasinoff and Kiriakos N. Kutulakos International Journal of Computer Vision, 81(1), pp. 82-104, 2009 (invited paper) Confocal Stereo  (oral) Samuel W. Hasinoff and Kiriakos N. Kutulakos Proc. 9th European Conference on Computer Vision, ECCV 2006, pp. 620-634 Longuet-Higgins Best Paper Award, Honorable Mention

Aperture bracketing for HDR and synthetic refocusing [project page]

Multiple-Aperture Photography for High Dynamic Range and Post-Capture Refocusing Samuel W. Hasinoff and Kiriakos N. Kutulakos Tech. Report, University of Toronto, Dept. of Computer Science, 2009 A Layer-Based Restoration Framework for Variable-Aperture Photography Samuel W. Hasinoff and Kiriakos N. Kutulakos Proc. 11th IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision, ICCV 2007, 8 pp.

3D reconstruction of semi-transparent scenes [project page]

Photo-Consistent Reconstruction of Semitransparent Scenes by Density-Sheet Decomposition Samuel W. Hasinoff and Kiriakos N. Kutulakos IEEE Trans. Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 29(5), pp. 870-885, 2007 Photo-Consistent 3D Fire by Flame-Sheet Decomposition  (oral) Samuel W. Hasinoff and Kiriakos N. Kutulakos Proc. 9th IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision, ICCV 2003, pp. 1184-1191 Three-Dimensional Reconstruction of Fire from Images Samuel W. Hasinoff MSc Thesis, University of Toronto, Dept. of Computer Science, 2002

Matting object boundaries for improved rendering from new viewpoints [project page]

Boundary Matting for View Synthesis [doi] Samuel W. Hasinoff, Sing Bing Kang, and Richard Szeliski Computer Vision and Image Understanding, 103(1), pp. 22-32, 2006 Boundary Matting for View Synthesis  (oral) Samuel W. Hasinoff, Sing Bing Kang, and Richard Szeliski Second IEEE Workshop on Image and Video Registration (with CVPR 2004), 8 pp.

Miscellany

Photon, Poisson noise [doi] Samuel W. Hasinoff Computer Vision: A Reference Guide, Springer, pp. 608-610, 2014 (invited) Saturation (imaging) [doi] Samuel W. Hasinoff Computer Vision: A Reference Guide, Springer, pp. 699-701, 2014 (invited) Solving Substitution Ciphers Samuel W. Hasinoff Tech. Report, University of Toronto, Dept. of Computer Science, 2003 Code available at SourceForge Reinforcement Learning for Problems with Hidden State Samuel W. Hasinoff Tech. Report, University of Toronto, Dept. of Computer Science, 2002

Tutorials

• Fundamentals of Computational Photography: Sensors and Noise (ICCP 2010) [pptx]