Raoul de Charette

Raoul de Charette is a Research Director in computer vision at Inria Paris, leading the Astra-Vision group within the ASTRA team. His academic journey includes a PhD from Mines Paris (2012) and Habilitation (HDR) in 2022, with research stints at Carnegie Mellon University (2011), Mines Paris (2013), and the University of Makedonia (2014).

His educational background comprises:

• PhD from Mines Paris (2012)
• Habilitation (HDR) (2022)

De Charette's research centers on robust and interpretable visual scene understanding, spanning 3D scene reconstruction, domain adaptation, material recognition, and physics-grounded vision foundation models. His work integrates physical principles and synthetic data to enhance model robustness in real-world scenarios like autonomous driving and urban environments. Key contributions include uncertainty-aware 3D scene completion (PaSCo), material extraction from single images (Material Palette), and prompt-driven domain adaptation (PODA).

Recent publications reveal a strategic shift toward vision-language integration, material-centric scene understanding, and foundation models that minimize labeled data dependency. His group pioneers physics-informed approaches to improve interpretability and resilience against environmental challenges like adverse weather conditions.

Key scientific recognition includes:

• Best Paper Honorable Mention at EGSR 2025 for MatSwap
• ELLIS Membership
• PR[AI]RIE-PSAI Fellowship

De Charette actively mentors four PhD students—Fatima Balde, Mohammad Fahes, Ivan Lopes, and Tetiana Martyniuk—often in industry collaborations with Valeo.ai and Kyutai. He secures funding through fellowships and industry partnerships, regularly opening PhD positions (including a 2025 opening for Physics-Grounded Vision Foundation Models). As an area chair for CVPR, ECCV, WACV, and IROS, he shapes the field through conference leadership and co-organizing initiatives like the African Computer Vision Summer School.

He directs the Astra-Vision group within Inria Paris' ASTRA team, driving interdisciplinary research at the intersection of computer vision, machine learning, and physics-based modeling for real-world deployment in robotics and intelligent transportation systems.