A research team including Professor Misha Kazhdan and CS PhD student Hongyi Liu won the Best Paper Award at the 2026 Symposium on Geometry Processing (SGP), hosted by the European Association for Computer Graphics (Eurographics) in Bern, Switzerland from July 1–3. SGP is the leading international venue for geometry processing research, bringing together advances in mathematics, computer science, and engineering to develop new methods for modeling, analyzing, and processing 3D shapes and geometry.
The winning paper, “Phong-Rodrigues Extrinsic Vector-Field Processing,” introduces a new approach to vector-field processing on surfaces, decoupling computation from domain geometry and enabling higher-order derivatives to be computed pointwise for the first time.
“In this work we propose decoupling the representation of the surface as a triangle mesh from the definition of its normals, following the approach proposed by Bui Tuong Phong almost half a century ago for obtaining smooth renderings,” explains Kazhdan. “We show that this approach provides a simple and elegant formulation of vector-field smoothness that enables realizing the broad suite of differential tools required for vector-field processing—a key step in a broad suite of applications including parameterization, fluid simulation, and signal registration.”
Considered a leader in image and geometry processing, particularly in surface reconstruction and shape analysis, Kazhdan holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and is affiliated with the Institute for Data-Intensive Engineering and Science. His research group is interested in developing data structures and algorithms for efficiently reconstructing high-resolution surfaces from large point clouds and developing new techniques for analyzing the geometry of 3D shapes, providing a means for performing shape retrieval from databases of 3D models.
Additional co-authors of this work include Oded Stein and Mirela Ben-Chen of the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology Computer Science Department and Amir Vaxman, a faculty member of the Institute of Perception, Action and Behavior at the University of Edinburgh.