Parag Havaldar, an IIT Kharagpur alumnus has won the Oscar technical award for the development of expression-based facial performance-capture technology at Sony Pictures Imageworks, the award was announced Jan. 6. Havaldar was graduated from the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at IIT Kharagpur in the year 1991.
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Havaldar’s pioneering system enabled the large-scale use of animation with rig-based facial performance-capture of motion pictures, combining with solutions for tracking, stabilisation, solving and animator-controllable curve editing.
The awards will be presented on Feb. 11 in Beverly Hills, ahead of the main Oscar ceremony that will be held on Feb. 26. According to Havaldar’s biodata in the University of California’s School of Engineering website, where he is also a part-time lecturer, he had done his BTech in computer science and engineering and also had done a PhD in computer vision in 1991 and graphics from the University of Southern California in 1996.
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Presently Havaldar is a software supervisor at the Sony Pictures Imageworks and he leads the company’s proprietary efforts in the area of performance capture. The technology was developed by him and his group, that have been used to create stylised and realistic character animations in a variety of movies including “Alice in Wonderland”, “Monster House”, “Hancock” and “Spiderman”.
By Premji
