Yoav Y. Schechner

Research interests

We are involved in three space projects with upcoming launches. They focus on atmospheric sciences, and push computational photography and space-enginering technologies to new frontiers.

CloudCT is a space mission to probe small clouds using 3D optical scattering tomography (CT), that will run on polarimetric images taken by a large orbiting formation of nano-satellites. It will seek better understanding of clouds and climate, and funded by the ERC. Principal Investigators: Yoav Schechner (Technion), Ilan Koren (WIS) and Klaus Schilling (ZfT).

C3IEL is a French-Israeli space mission to probe lightinings, updrafts and water vapor distributions. Data will come from a set of optical cameras on a pair of satellites orbiting in formation. We are on the science team of C3IEL, developing algorithms for its CLOUD experiment. We are also at the heart of camera specifications tailored to the science goals, and calibration.

MAIA is a NASA/ASI project to study air pollution created by aerosols. Data will come from spaceborne and ground assetts. The MAIA satellite will carry multi-angular polarimetric spectro-radiometric imaging. We are on the science team of MAIA. We further facilitate ground-based chemical speciation of pollutants, as well as Aeronet data measured at our site.

Wanted: Students to join exciting research breakthroughs, having interest in any of the following: computer vision, optics, image processing, meteorology, climate.

More broadly, our studies on computaional imaging and vision include:

Deep learning in accelerated scattering tomography; 3D atmospheric recovery; medical X-ray CT through scatter; refractive distortions (virtual periscope); imaging through turbid (scattering) media e.g., overcoming haze and underwater imaging; Spaceborne multiview recovery; computational imaging on the electric grid; illumination multiplexing; 3D shape estimation based on defocus and diffracted-rotated PSFs; separation and reconstruction of semireflections and transparent layers; polarization and multispectral imaging; radiometric self-calibration; overcoming and exploiting lens-flare and random illumination caustics; recovery limits under pointwise degradations; audio-visual, cross-modal analysis.

Here is a Wordl based on the research page:

What's new?

1. April 2026: Our first CloudCT satellite, the Precursor, is shipped for Launch, expected in June 2026. It passed integration and testing, and it is on the way.