Dhawal Sirikonda

I am a PhD candidate at Dartmouth working with Prof. Adithya Pediredla in the Rendering and Imaging Science Lab (RISc). I build next-generation, low-cost LiDAR and imaging systems for high-speed perception and communication, drawing on diverse sensor modalities — event cameras, RGB-D, and emerging hybrid architectures. My current work repurposes acousto-optic beam steering and software-defined radios to push structured-light 3D scanning, time-of-flight depth imaging, and underwater optical communication to million-per-second rates on commodity hardware. I am particularly interested in computational methods that make real-world sensing robust and practical. Prior to my PhD, I completed my Master’s working with Prof. PJ Narayanan at the intersection of 3D vision and real-time graphics.

view my CV

research interests

Some things I'm interested in:

• Sensors (ToF, motion contrast, etc.)
• Processing sensor data
• HPC and automation for real-world applications

personal

some personal facts:

• I like capturing low-light images.
• Listening to music (less lyrical).
• Driving (I enjoy driving long distances).
• I collect a lot of superhero merchandise and am fond of bubble tea.
• I am borderline dyslexic (or maybe mildly dysgraphic, as ChatGPT suggests), so I occasionally (debatable 😬) invent new spellings for words like friend → freind or field → feild. And yes, this page has been corrected by ChatGPT.

publications

* = Equal contribution

• SDR-ToF: Million Optical Depth Samples per Second Using Software-Defined Radio SIGGRAPH Asia (ACM ToG), 2026
  Ramchander Bhaskara*, Dhawal Sirikonda*, Omkar Vengurlekar*, Juhyeon Kim, Joseph Lazarro, Suren Jayasuriya, Adithya Pediredla.
• Underwater Optical Backscatter Communications using Acousto-Optic Beam Steering SIGGRAPH Asia (ACM ToG), 2025
  Atul Rohit Agarwal*, Dhawal Sirikonda*, Atharv Agashe, Ziang Ren, Dinithi Silva-Sassaman, Charles Carver, Alberto Quattrini Li, Xia Zhou, Adithya Pediredla.
• Structured light with a million light planes per second ICCP (TPAMI), 2025
  Dhawal Sirikonda, Praneeth Chakravarthula, Ioannis Gkioulekas, Adithya Pediredla.
• GSN: Generalisable Segmentation in Neural Radiance Field AAAI, 2024
  Vinayak Gupta, Rahul Goel, Dhawal Sirikonda, P. J. Narayanan.
• FusedRF: Fusing Multiple Radiance Fields XRNeRF CVPR Workshop, 2023
  Rahul Goel, Dhawal Sirikonda, Rajvi Shah, P. J. Narayanan.
• Interactive Segmentation of Radiance Fields CVPR, 2023
  Rahul Goel*, Dhawal Sirikonda*, Saurabh Saini, P. J. Narayanan.
• Real-Time Rendering of Arbitrary Surface Geometries using Learnt Transfer ICVGIP, 2022
  Dhawal Sirikonda, Aakash KT, P. J. Narayanan.
• Learnt Transfer for Surface Geometries HPG (Poster), 2022
  Dhawal Sirikonda, Aakash KT, P. J. Narayanan.
• StyleTRF: Stylizing Tensorial Radiance Fields ICVGIP, 2022
  Rahul Goel*, Dhawal Sirikonda*, Saurabh Saini, P. J. Narayanan.
• PRTT: Precomputed Radiance Transfer Textures arXiv, 2022
  Dhawal Sirikonda, Aakash KT, P. J. Narayanan.
• Transfer Textures for Fast Precomputed Radiance Transfer EuroGraphics (2-page Poster), 2022
  Dhawal Sirikonda, Aakash KT, P. J. Narayanan.
• Neural View Synthesis with Appearance Editing from Unstructured Images ICVGIP, 2021
  Pulkit Gera, Aakash KT, Dhawal Sirikonda, P. J. Narayanan.
• Appearance Editing with Free-viewpoint Neural Rendering arXiv, 2021
  Pulkit Gera, Aakash KT, Dhawal Sirikonda, Parikshit Sakurikar, P. J. Narayanan.

patents

• MHz-Rate Optical Depth Imaging Using Software-Defined Radios U.S. Patent Application No. 64/113,861 · Filed July 17, 2026 Pediredla et al.
• Underwater Optical Backscatter Communication Using Acousto-Optic Beam Steering U.S. Patent Application No. 63/913,085 · Filed November 6, 2025 Pediredla et al.
• Event-Enhanced Histopathology Apparatus U.S. Patent Application No. 63/837,253 · Filed July 2, 2025 Pediredla et al.

talks & presentations

• Using Sound to Steer Light and Light to Measure Sound talk

  VASC Seminar 2026 · Vision and Autonomous Systems Center, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Pittsburgh, PA, USA

• Controlling Light With Sound live demo

  ICCP 2026 · IEEE International Conference on Computational Photography, Princeton, NJ, USA · with Quinton (Ziyuan) Qu, Ramchander Bhaskara, and Ankit Burudgunte

• From Rendering to Imaging: Controlling Light with Sound talk

  NESG 2026 · New England Symposium on Graphics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA, USA

• Underwater Optical Backscatter Communications using Acousto-Optic Beam Steering presentation

  SIGGRAPH Asia 2025 · ACM SIGGRAPH Asia Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, Hong Kong SAR

• Structured light with a million light planes per second presentation

  NECV 2025 · New England Computer Vision Workshop, University of Massachusetts (UMass) Amherst, MA, USA

• Structured light with a million light planes per second presentation

  ICCP 2025 · IEEE International Conference on Computational Photography, Toronto, ON, Canada

• Interactive Segmentation of Radiance Fields presentation

  NECV 2023 · New England Computer Vision Workshop, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA

projects

• Ultra-Fast Low-Cost LiDAR

  Research Project

  Building inexpensive LiDAR from commodity software-defined-radio hardware, reaching MHz-rate optical depth sampling for real-time, high-speed perception.

• Using AO to Sculpt and Steer Light Planes at High Speeds for Scanning Applications

  Research Project

  This project focuses on leveraging Acousto-Optic (AO) techniques to dynamically sculpt and steer light planes at high speeds, enabling efficient and precise scanning applications.

• Underwater Communication

  Research Project

  This project explores the use of Acousto-Optic (AO) sculpting techniques to enhance underwater communication systems.

• Object Retrieval from Radiance Fields

  Research Project (with Dr. Rajvi Shah)

  Interactive object and sub-scene retrieval from scenes represented as Radiance Fields. The work involves growing high-confidence object content to encompass intricate details, aiming for accurate retrieval.

• Real-time Rendering of Implicit Surfaces using Precomputed Radiance Transfer

  Thesis · CVIT, IIIT-H, 2022

  A simple yet fast approach to address the lack of a storage schema in the functional representation of surfaces for the incorporation of Precomputed Radiance Transfer (Spherical Harmonics) for both glossy and diffuse materials.

• Exploring Storage Schemas for Transfer Vector Storage

  Research Project · IIIT-H, 2022

  Exploration of storage schemas (UV and vertex attributes) to find optimal sampling and interpolation strategies for artifact-free renders.

• Appearance Editing and Novel View Synthesis of Captured Data

  Research Project · CVIT, IIIT-H, 2021

  Extends Novel View synthesis pipelines to accommodate appearance edits. Uses differentiable rendering to separate appearance, followed by a disentangled rendering framework.