Dr. Gemma Rotger wins a CERCA Pioner Award 2021 for her doctoral thesis

Dr. Gemma Rotger, CVC Alumni, has been granted the CERCA Pioneer Award 2021 for her doctoral thesis. The prize is a recognition for researchers who have presented a doctoral thesis with results that are clearly aimed at commercial exploitation.

The Pioneer Awards aim to recognise those researchers working in one of the CERCA centres who have presented a doctoral thesis through which they propose to initiate or improve the development of a technology or product that may have an industrial or commercial application or might even make a significant specific contribution to the development of public policy.

One of the six winners of this year’s edition has been Dr. Gemma Rotger, former CVC PhD student, for her thesis “Lifelike Humans: Detailed Reconstruction of Expressive Human Faces”, which was developed at CVC - supervised by Dr. Felipe Lumbreras - and the Institute of Robotics and Industrial Informatics (IRI).

The jury considered that her thesis, which develops novel techniques to achieve the automatic generation of detailed and realistic faces of synthetic human characters through low-cost setups, has a direct application in the present and future of the entertainment industry.  

The work incorporates a new method to automatically describe realistic details to the characters, such as wrinkles, facial expressions or micro-expressions, without user interaction or learning data, looking for their robustness and simplicity of configuration. The proposal offers a pioneering approach, which reduces modelling costs and could revolutionize the industry by easily adapting to existing solutions currently on the market.

The Pioneer Awards ceremony took place on December 20, 2021, in a virtual format on the CERCA YouTube channel.

Congratulations Gemma!