Ma photo

Joëlle Thollot

Contact
MAVERICK
INRIA Rhône-Alpes
655, avenue de l'Europe
38334 Saint Ismier Cedex
FRANCE
Phone:(+33) 4 76 61 54 24
Fax:(+33) 4 76 61 54 40

I'm full professor at Grenoble INP (university in Grenoble) and researcher in Maverick at INRIA. I am mainly working on non-photorealistic rendering.

Research themes

There is no reason to restrict the digital images to a simulation of physically accurate lighting. As in visula arts, synthetic images open fascinating new avenues for rendering images that convey particular views, emphasis, or style. These approaches are often referred to as "non-photorealistic rendering", although I prefer the term "expressive rendering".

A part of computer graphics can be viewed as a visual communication tool. Such a point of view implies several goals that we target with expressive rendering. In particular the user of an expressive rendering tool should be able to produce the images he has in mind.

This involves, in particular, significant work on the notion of relevance, which is necessarily application-dependent. The relevance should guide the level of abstraction of the rendered scene to let the user emphasize the most important elements of the input 3d scene. It can also be defined from a levels-of-detail point of view: not only can we adapt the geometry to decrease the computation time, but we can also adapt the rendering style to meet the user's goals.

Another research direction for expressive rendering concerns rendering styles: in many cases it should be possible to define the constitutive elements of styles, allowing the application of a given rendering style to different scenes, or in the long term the capture of style elements from collections of images.

Finally, since the application of expressive rendering techniques generally amounts to a visual simplification, or abstraction, of the scene, particular care must be taken to make the resulting images consistent over time, for interactive or animated imagery. This leads to various projects targeting the temporal coherence of animated scenes.

Publications

Funded Projects

The ARC INRIA project ARCHEOS has been a first attempt to work with archaelogists. This project was targeting a virtual immersion in the ancient Greek city of Argos.
The ARC INRIA MIRO continued the collaboration with archaeologists adressing the problem of producing legible renderings.

Work with studio productions has been conducted with Studio Broceliande and in the context of the ANR Animare. These projects aim at creating renderings tools for digital artists.

Cartography is another application of expressive rendering that we targeted in the ANR project Mapstyle.

Teaching

I am teaching at ENSIMAG.

I teach formal language theory, discrete maths, UML, but also creative thinking, theater as a communication tool and other less scientific courses.

I am working on the developpment of applied math cursus in Senegal and Togo in the ERASMUS+ ASICIAO project.

Personnal area

Some of my drawings.

My brother's music: Ceux d'en face, Contact, Piano pieces.