belenmasia
Associate Professor, Computer Science Department, Universidad de Zaragoza.
Member of the Graphics & Imaging Lab, I3A Institute.
Member of the Vision, Image and Neurodevelopment Group, IIS Aragon Institute.

Maria de Luna, 1. Edificio Ada Byron. 50018, Zaragoza (Spain).
Email: bmasia (at) unizar (dot) es
Google Scholar


Short biography: Belen Masia is a tenured Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at Universidad de Zaragoza. She is a member of the Graphics & Imaging Lab of the I3A Institute, and of the Vision, Image and Neurodevelopment Group of the IIS Aragon Institute. Her research focuses on the areas of computational imaging, applied perception, and virtual reality. Before, she was a postdoctoral researcher at Max Planck Institute for Informatics. Belen received a Eurographics Young Researcher Award in 2017, a Eurographics PhD Award in 2015, an award to the top ten innovators below 35 in Spain from MIT Technology Review in 2014, and an NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship in 2012. She has served as an Associate Editor for ACM Transactions on Graphics, Computers and Graphics, and ACM Transactions on Applied Perception. She is also a co-founder of DIVE Medical, a startup devoted to enabling an automatic, fast, and accurate exploration of the visual function, even in non-verbal patients.

Research topics

· Virtual reality: Our work in virtual reality pursues understanding and modeling user behaviour in virtual environments. This includes saliency prediction, modeling of multimodal perception, or the exploration of cinematography in VR, among other topics.
· Modeling and perception of appearance: Our goal is finding appearance representations that correlate well with human perception and are intuitive to manipulate and edit by users. With this goal in mind, we work on the design of material appearance metrics, intuitive control spaces for editing, and applications such as gamut mapping.
· Applied perception and visual function: Our work leverages insights from how the human visual works and computational models of perception to improve algorithms and techniques in graphics and vision. In addition to this, we work on the evaluation of the visual function and the diagnosis of visual defects in non-collaborative patients.
· Other topics of interest include high dynamic range imaging and computational displays.

News

Oct 2023

Our work "D-SAV360: A Dataset of Gaze Scanpaths on 360º Ambisonic Videos" has been accepted to the Journal Track of ISMAR 2023! Our dataset with 4,500+ gaze and head trajectories of 87 participants watching 85 360º videos with directional audio is available in the project webpage.

Oct 2023

Our work on "Task-dependent Visual Behavior in Immersive Environments" has been accepted to the Journal Track of ISMAR 2023! We analyze differences in gaze behavior of participants when performing free exploration of a scene, a memory task or a visual search task in a within-subjects experimental design.

Jun 2023

Our work "The Visual Language of Fabrics" has been accepted to SIGGRAPH 2023! Our dataset with 3,000 fabric materials (45,000+ images) and 15,000+ associated natural language descriptions is available in the project webpage.

Jun 2023

My PhD student Julia Guerrero-Viu (co-advised with Diego Gutierrez) has been selected as one of WiGRAPH's Rising Stars 2023. A fantastic opportunity to receive mentoring and guidance for her future career. Congratulations!

May 2023

My former PhD student Manuel Lagunas (co-advised with Diego Gutierrez, Manuel graduated in Dec. 2021) has received a Young Researcher Award from the Spanish Computer Science Society (SCIE) and the BBVA Foundation ("Premios de Investigación Sociedad Científica Informática de España" a Investigadores Jóvenes en Informática). Congratulations!

Feb 2023

My PhD student Sandra Malpica (co-advised with Diego Gutierrez) has successfully defended her PhD Thesis! She received a sobresaliente cum laude grade (the top grade at Unizar). Starting Apr. 2023, she will be postdoctoral researcher in the ViRVIG group at UPC. Best of luck on this new adventure!

Feb 2023

Our work "A Study of Change Blindness in Immersive Environments" has been accepted to IEEE VR 2023 Journal Track!

Mar 2022
Mar 2022

Our work "ScanGAN360: A Generative Model of Realistic Scanpaths for 360º Images" has been accepted to IEEE VR Journal Track (which publishes in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics). Code and model are available in the project page. Update: It has received a Best Journal Track Paper Award!

Feb 2022

Our work "A Generative Framework for Image-based Editing of Material Appearance using Perceptual Attributes" has been published in Computer Graphics Forum, and will be presented at Eurographics 2022. Code and model are available in the project page.

Dec 2021

Our survey on Multimodality in VR has been accepted to ACM Computing Surveys.

Dec 2021

My PhD student Manuel Lagunas (co-advised with Diego Gutierrez) has successfully defended his PhD Thesis! He received a sobresaliente cum laude grade (the top grade at Unizar). Starting Jan. 2022, he will be an Applied Scientist at Amazon Madrid. Best of luck on this new adventure!

Dec 2021

Our work on "Evaluation of Fixational Behavior throughout Life" has been published in Brain Sciences.

May 2021

Our work on "Perception of material appearance: A comparison between painted and rendered images" has been published in the Journal of Vision.

Apr 2021

I will serve on the SIGGRAPH Asia 2021 Technical Papers Committee. Submissions due May 21st (forms May 20th).

Mar 2021

Our work exploring the "Influence of directional sound cues on users' exploration across 360º movie cuts" has been published in IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications. Preprint available here.

Mar 2021

I will serve on the EGSR 2021 Program Committee. Submissions due April 16th (abstracts April 9th). Both full research papers, as well as industry papers, are welcome.

Feb 2021

Our work investigating "The joint role of geometry and illumination on material recognition" has been published in the Journal of Vision.

Oct 2020

We are part of the EU-funded PRIME Innovative Training Network, focused on predictive rendering and accurate appearance reproduction. Looking forward to years of fruitful collaboration among the excellent consortium!

Oct 2020

Glad to announce that I have been awarded with one of the Leonardo Fellowships from the BBVA Foundation.
We will be working on evaluating the visual function in children and other non-collaborative patients with deep learning techniques.

Sep 2020

Our work on "Imperceptible manipulation of lateral camera motion for improved virtual reality applications" has been accepted to SIGGRAPH Asia 2020. Code and data available here.

Jul 2020

Our work on how "Auditory stimuli degrade visual performance in virtual reality" has been published in Scientific Reports. Code and data available here.

May 2020

My former PhD student Ana Serrano (graduated April 2019) received one of the Eurographics PhD Awards this year. Congrats!

Apr 2020

I will serve on the SIGGRAPH Asia 2020 Technical Papers Committee. Submissions due May 22nd (forms May 21st).

Mar 2020

Next academic year (2020-2021) we will be offering a new Masters degree in Robotics, Graphics and Vision at Universidad de Zaragoza. It will be taught in English, and is supported by the Computer Science Department, the Robotics, Perception and Real Time Group, and the Graphics and Imaging Lab. Preadmission is already open!

Mar 2020

I will serve on the EGSR 2020 Program Committee. Submissions due April 17th (abstracts April 13th).

Feb 2020

My former PhD student Ana Serrano (graduated April 2019) received the Outstanding Thesis Award from Universidad de Zaragoza.

Jul 2019

Our work on "A similarity measure for material appearance" will be presented at SIGGRAPH 2019 in Los Angeles! This work has the ACM Artifacts Evaluated and Results Replicated seals; code and data are available here.

Jun 2019

I co-chair the Computational Visual Media Conference 2020, to be held in Macau in September 2020. Submissions due October 11th, 2019.

Apr 2019

I co-chair the SIGGRAPH Asia 2019 Technical Briefs & Posters Programs. We look forward to your best work being presented in Australia! Submissions deadline is August 12th.

Mar 2019

We just presented our work on 6-DoF video at IEEE VR 2019 in Osaka: "Motion parallax for 360° RGBD video". Code and demo available here.

Jan 2019

I will serve on the SIGGRAPH 2019 Technical Papers Committee.