An Associate Professor in the Department of Math & Computing Science at Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, Canada, with prior postdoctoral appointments at the Graphics Lab, Department of Computer Science, University of Victoria, and the Geospatial Intelligence Lab, University of Calgary. Completed a PhD at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras) under the supervision of Prof. Ramanathan Muthuganapathy, and a Master’s degree at the National Institute of Technology Karnataka.

Research Interests

My research lies at the intersection of 3D computer vision, computer graphics, geometric learning, and spatial computing, with a focus on developing scalable, learning-based algorithms for understanding and modeling large-scale 3D environments. Motivated by challenges in urban, environmental and planetary sensing, my work emphasizes principled integration of geometry, topology, and machine learning for robust perception from 3D data.

A central theme of my research is the analysis of point clouds acquired from LiDAR and RGB-D sensors, where I design methods that are both computationally efficient and structurally aware. Rather than treating 3D data as unstructured inputs, my work leverages spatial data structures, geometric priors, and topological representations to improve scalability, generalization, and interpretability of learning-based models.

My recent and ongoing work focuses on:

  • Point cloud processing and representation learning for large-scale LiDAR and RGB-D data
  • Semantic surface reconstruction and scene understanding in complex urban environments
  • Spatial data structures and hierarchical representations for efficient 3D computation
  • Geometric and topological deep learning, including topology-aware sampling, feature learning, and structural regularization

The broader goal of my research is to enable next-generation 3D spatial intelligence that supports applications such as digital twins, urban modeling and simulation, autonomous perception, and environmental monitoring, while remaining grounded in solid geometric and algorithmic foundations.​

Open Positions

We have a few available positions at the level of PhD, MSc and BSc. See the group page for more details.

Professional Activities

  • Editorial
  • Session Chair/Committees
    • Session chair, 3D Data Construction, Processing and Evaluation (Posters), IEEE IGARSS 2023
    • NSERC CS Scholarship Committee (Member), 2022-25
    • Science Atlantic CS Committee (Member), 2023-
    • AARMS CRG Scientific Machine Learning (Member), 2021-
    • IEEE GRSS Image Analysis & Data Fusion (Member), 2023-
    • Program Committee (Member)- CRV 2026, ’24
    • Program Committee (Member)- ISVC 2019-
    • Program Committee (Member)- CVPR USM3D 2024
    • Review Committee (Member)-CAD 2020
  • Ad hoc Reviewer
    • Funding agencies
      • NSERC DG
      • MITACS Accelerate
    • Journals-
      • IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI)
      • IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (TIP)
      • IEEE Transactions on Geoscience & Remote Sensing (TGRS)
      • IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems
      • Computer Vision and Image Understanding, Elsevier (CVIU)
      • Image & Vision Computing, Elsevier (IVC)
      • Computer Graphics Forum, Wiley (CGF)
      • Computers & Graphics, Elsevier (C & G)
    • Conferences-
      • CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, WACV, BMVC, CRV, ISVC, INDOOR3D, SIBGRAPI, ISPRS Congress

Memberships

  • ACM SIGGRAPH
  • ASIA Graphics Association
  • Solid Modeling Association (SMA)
  • ACM SIGSPATIAL
  • Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
  • IEEE Computer Society
  • IEEE Geoscience & Remote Sensing Society

Contact

Office: MN130, McNally North (see the map below),
Department of Math & Computing Science,
Saint Mary’s University,
912 Robie Street, Halifax, Canada-B3H3C3
e-mail: jiju.poovvancheri@smu.ca/jijupnair2000@gmail.com
phone: +1 902 420 5787