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.

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

Research direction. I work on a common question across natural images and scientific sensing: how can learned visual priors restore information that is missing, corrupted, or under-sampled while remaining faithful to the observation?

Current Research

Four connected directions currently shape my work.

Generative Image Restoration

Latent-space restoration with StyleGAN and diffusion-based priors for deblurring, denoising and inpainting, including unsupervised and training-free settings.

StyleGANDiffusionRestoration

Hyperspectral Gaussian Splatting

Extending Gaussian representations beyond RGB to model spatial structure and rich spectral information for hyperspectral reconstruction and super-resolution.

Gaussian SplattingHSISpectral Learning

Implicit HSI Super-Resolution

Continuous neural representations for recovering high-resolution hyperspectral signals from limited spatial observations, with emphasis on spectral fidelity.

LIIFNeural FieldsSuper-Resolution

HSI Denoising & Restoration

Physics-aware and low-rank representations that exploit the strong spatial-spectral redundancy of hyperspectral observations for robust restoration.

Low RankDenoisingPhysics-Aware

Research Toolkit

Representation Learning

Generative priors, latent inversion, neural fields, Gaussian splatting, low-rank spectral representations.

Image Restoration

Deblurring, denoising, inpainting, super-resolution, blind and zero-shot restoration.

Scientific Imaging

Hyperspectral data, spectral reconstruction, spatial-spectral modelling and remote-sensing workflows.

Data Acquisition

UAV mission planning, multi-altitude aerial imaging, field campaigns and dataset construction.

News

  • [Sep 2026] Submitted three papers to ICASSP 2027.
  • [Sep 2026] Submitted one paper to AISTATS 2027.
  • [Apr 2026] Paper GenR accepted in Pattern Recognition Letters (Elsevier).
  • [Mar 2026] Completed six months at Helmholtz Institute Freiberg on the Research Lab Abroad Fellowship.
  • [Sep 2025] Presented two papers at IEEE ICIP 2025, Anchorage, Alaska.
  • [Jul 2025] Both ICIP papers published on IEEE Xplore.
  • [May 2025] Awarded the Research Lab Abroad Fellowship (Visvesvaraya PhD Scheme, MeitY).
  • [May 2025] Two papers accepted at IEEE ICIP 2025 (COT-AD and IRUSIR).
  • [Jun 2024] Attended 3D Vision Summer School, IIIT Bangalore.
  • [May 2024] Presented at the Visvesvaraya PhD Scheme Workshop, IIT Mandi.
  • [May 2023] First field campaign with the Earth Science group.
  • [Early 2023] Certified as a UAV Pilot for platforms up to 25 kg.
  • [Feb 2023] Parkinson's disease chapter published by Springer Nature.
  • [Dec 2022] Joined IIT Gandhinagar as a Ph.D. scholar.
  • [2022] Qualified UGC-NET in Computer Applications.
  • [Sep 2021] Joined IIT Ropar as a project associate.
  • [Jul 2021] Completed M.Tech at Aliah University, second rank overall.
  • [Jul 2019] Completed B.Tech at Aliah University, first rank overall.