François Pitié
I am an Ussher Assistant Professor in Media Signal Processing in the Department of Electronic & Electrical Engineering at Trinity College Dublin. I lead research within the Sigmedia Research Group, collaborate with the ADAPT Research Centre, and am an elected Fellow of Trinity College Dublin (FTCD).
My research develops applied mathematics and machine learning for visual media, with a particular focus on film and visual-effects production, image and video processing, and efficient video compression. I am interested in making pictures better while giving artists greater control and reducing the computational cost of AI. My work spans continuous optimal transport for automated colour grading, interactive image matting, and lightweight, energy-efficient neural video processing.
My research has translated into practical technology used by organisations including Google, YouTube and Foundry, with commercial licensing to visual AI platforms such as PhotoRoom. Sigmedia also represents Trinity in the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia), contributing to the development of open video-compression standards.
News
| 2026 | Awarded the University Excellence in Teaching Award and the Inspiring Educator Award by Trinity College Dublin. |
|---|---|
| 2026 | Elected Fellow of Trinity College Dublin (FTCD). |
| 2025 | Paper on Demystifying the use of Compression in Virtual Production published in the SMPTE Motion Imaging Journal. |
| 2025 | Released course lecture notes on Deep Learning and its Applications on Zenodo. |
| 2024 | Paper on Lightweight Video Denoising Using a Classic Bayesian Backbone presented at IEEE ICME 2024. |
| 2023 | Horizon Europe project EMERALD (AI and Process Automation for Sustainable Entertainment and Media) commenced with European partners. |
| 2023 | Paper on Pushing the Limits of the Wiener Filter in Image Denoising presented at IEEE ICIP 2023. |
Selected Publications
all publications →- 2026Julien Zouein, Vibhoothi, François Pitié, Anil KokaramIEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), 2026
@inproceedings{Zouein:2026:efficient, author = {Zouein, Julien and Vibhoothi and Pitié, François and Kokaram, Anil}, title = {{Efficient Dense Matching for Enhanced Gaussian Splatting Using AV1 Motion Vectors}}, booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP)}, year = {2026}, eprint = {2605.14629}, archivePrefix = {arXiv}, note = {Accepted for publication (in press)}, doi = {10.1109/ICIP61757.2026.11630147}, pages = {1--6}, publisher = {IEEE} } - 2025Bat-Erdene Ganbaatar, François PitiéCVMP '25: Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGGRAPH European Conference on Visual Media Production, 2025
@inproceedings{Ganbaatar:2025:consistent, author = {Ganbaatar, Bat-Erdene and Pitié, François}, title = {{Towards Consistent Automatic Colour Grading: A Scene-Aware Neural Network for Illuminant Estimation}}, booktitle = {CVMP '25: Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGGRAPH European Conference on Visual Media Production}, year = {2025}, doi = {10.1145/3756863.3769704} } - 2025Clément Bled, François PitiéACM SIGGRAPH European Conference on Visual Media Production (CVMP), 2025
@inproceedings{Bled:2025:multi, author = {Bled, Clément and Pitié, François}, title = {{Multi Task Denoiser Training for Solving Linear Inverse Problems}}, booktitle = {ACM SIGGRAPH European Conference on Visual Media Production (CVMP)}, year = {2025}, doi = {10.1145/3756863.3769703}, eprint = {2512.04709}, archivePrefix = {arXiv} } - 2025Vibhoothi, François Pitié, Anil Kokaram2025 IEEE Picture Coding Symposium, 2025
@inproceedings{Vibhoothi:2025:litevpnet, author = {Vibhoothi and Pitié, François and Kokaram, Anil}, title = {{LiteVPNet: A Lightweight Network for Video Encoding Control in Quality-Critical Applications}}, booktitle = {2025 IEEE Picture Coding Symposium}, year = {2025}, doi = {10.1109/PCS65673.2025.11417531}, pages = {1--5}, publisher = {IEEE} } - 2024Clément Bled, François Pitié2024 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME), 2024
@inproceedings{Bled:2024:lightweight, author = {Bled, Clément and Pitié, François}, title = {{Lightweight Video Denoising Using a Classic Bayesian Backbone}}, booktitle = {2024 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME)}, pages = {1-6}, year = {2024}, doi = {10.1109/ICME57554.2024.10688172}, keywords = {Wiener filters;Costs;Noise;Closed box;Streaming media;Transformers;Motion compensation;Bayes methods;Video Denoising;Image Sequence Denoising;Wiener Filter}, publisher = {IEEE} } - 2023Clément Bled, François Pitié2023 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), 2023
@inproceedings{Bled:2023:pushing, author = {Bled, Clément and Pitié, François}, title = {{Pushing the Limits of the Wiener Filter in Image Denoising}}, booktitle = {2023 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP)}, pages = {2590-2594}, year = {2023}, doi = {10.1109/ICIP49359.2023.10222826}, keywords = {Wiener filters;Filtering;Neural networks;Benchmark testing;Convolutional neural networks;Optimization;Image denoising;Image Denoising;Wiener Filter}, publisher = {IEEE} } - 2023Vibhoothi, François Pitié, Angeliki Katsenou, Yeping Su, Balu Adsumilli, Anil Kokaram2023 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME), 2023
@inproceedings{Vibhoothi:2023:comparison, author = {Vibhoothi and Pitié, François and Katsenou, Angeliki and Su, Yeping and Adsumilli, Balu and Kokaram, Anil}, title = {{Comparison of HDR quality metrics in Per-Clip Lagrangian multiplier optimisation with AV1}}, booktitle = {2023 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME)}, pages = {1655-1660}, year = {2023}, doi = {10.1109/ICME55011.2023.00285}, keywords = {Measurement;Codecs;Rate-distortion;ITU;High dynamic range;Complexity theory;Optimization;HDR;Quality Metrics;AV1;Rate-Distortion Optimisation}, publisher = {IEEE} } - 2020Marco Forte, B Price, S Cohen, N Xu, François PitiéIEEE International Conference on Multimedia & Expo, 2020
@inproceedings{Forte:2020:interactive, author = {Forte, Marco and Price, B and Cohen, S and Xu, N and Pitié, François}, title = {{Interactive Training and Architecture for Deep Object Selection}}, booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Multimedia & Expo}, year = {2020}, doi = {10.1109/ICME46284.2020.9102942}, pages = {1--6}, publisher = {IEEE} } - 2020Marco Forte, François PitiéarXiv preprint arXiv:2003.07711, 2020
@article{Forte:2020:alpha, author = {Forte, Marco and Pitié, François}, title = {{F, B, Alpha Matting}}, journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2003.07711}, year = {2020}, eprint = {2003.07711}, archivePrefix = {arXiv}, primaryClass = {cs.CV}, url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.07711} } - 2007François Pitié, Anil Kokaram, Rozenn DahyotComputer Vision and Image Understanding, 2007
@article{Piti:2007:automated, author = {Pitié, François and Kokaram, Anil and Dahyot, Rozenn}, title = {{Automated Colour Grading using Colour Distribution Transfer}}, journal = {Computer Vision and Image Understanding}, volume = {107}, number = {1-2}, pages = {123--137}, year = {2007}, doi = {10.1016/j.cviu.2006.11.011} }