Brief Bio

I am a fourth-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Gandhinagar, advised by Prof. Shanmuganathan Raman. I lead an independent research line on generative priors for image restoration — latent inversion in StyleGAN and diffusion models, zero-shot and training-free restoration, and 2D/3D Gaussian splatting for hyperspectral imaging.

My work sits deliberately across disciplines. I collaborate with computer scientists, earth scientists and agricultural researchers, and I have built and released datasets that serve all three. I am currently a Visiting Researcher at the Helmholtz Institute Freiberg (HZDR), Germany, on the Research Lab Abroad Fellowship under the Visvesvaraya PhD Scheme (MeitY).

Before IIT Gandhinagar, I was a Project Associate at IIT Ropar on hyperspectral-stereo fusion for industrial volume estimation. I hold an M.Tech (2nd rank) and B.Tech (1st rank) in CSE from Aliah University, Kolkata, and a UAV Pilot Licence for platforms up to 25 kg.

I am open to research positions at the boundary of visual learning, generative modelling and real-world sensing. Best way to reach me: akbar.ali@iitgn.ac.in.

Research Interests

• Generative priors for image restoration (denoising, deblurring, inpainting)
• Latent inversion in StyleGAN and diffusion models
• Zero-shot and training-free image restoration
• 2D/3D Gaussian splatting for hyperspectral imaging
• Aerial and hyperspectral data acquisition and processing

News