Jack Naylor

PhD Candidate
Australian Centre for Robotics, The University of Sydney

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I've defended my PhD thesis, and am now on the job market!

I am a PhD Candidate in the Robotic Imaging Group at the Australian Centre for Robotics (ACFR), The University of Sydney. My research is focussed on developing new sensors, algorithms and scene representations to help autonomous systems understand and interact with the world. I am particularly interested in giving robots new ways to operate under visually challenging conditions, including in the presence of reflections in industrial settings, in smoke and fog, and in the presence of intense sunlight on-orbit.

At the ACFR I am advised by Donald Dansereau, and in 2025 was a Fulbright Future Scholar working with Matt O'Toole at Carnegie Mellon University.

News

Nov 2026
I successfully defended my PhD thesis, Sampling and Reconstruction of Visually Challenging Scenes with Radiance-Based Methods! A huge thank you to my supervisors, co-authors and collaborators for their support throughout, and to everyone who came along to the defence.
Oct 2026
I’ve joined the organising committee for the 1st Australian Computational Imaging Workshop, to be held 15–16 February 2027. Stay tuned for more details!
Aug 2026
I’ll be at ADSTAR 2026 next week presenting an e-Poster on our ongoing work on appearance-aware on-orbit inspection! See the poster here and reach out if you’ll be in Adelaide!
Jul 2026
Happy to share I’ve received a University of Sydney Faculty of Engineering Career Advancement Award to support my work over the next six months while I am under examination. I’ll be working on new light field image processing techniques for non-Lambertian scenes.
May 2026
I’ll be at CVPR in Denver next week presenting Surf-NeRF at the Third Workshop for Learning 3D with Multi-View Supervision (3DMV), and helping present our work on multi-frequency time-of-flight radiance fields at the Computational Cameras and Displays workshop! Please do reach out if you will be there and would like to catch up!

Selected Publications

Full list

$Figure from “$\partial$LITE: Differentiable Lighting-Informed Trajectory Evaluation for On-Orbit Inspection”$

$\partial$LITE: Differentiable Lighting-Informed Trajectory Evaluation for On-Orbit Inspection

Jack Naylor, Raghav Mishra, Nicholas Barbara, Donald G. Dansereau

Acta Astronautica, 2027 (Selected for Special Issue)

project page arxiv video doi

@article{naylor2026dlite,
  author = {Naylor, Jack and Mishra, Raghav and Barbara, Nicholas and Dansereau, Donald G.},
  title = {$\partial$LITE: Differentiable Lighting-Informed Trajectory Evaluation for On-Orbit Inspection},
  journal = {Acta Astronautica},
  year = {2027},
  volume = {250},
  pages = {404-415},
  doi = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actaastro.2026.09.001}
}

Surf-NeRF: Surface Regularised Neural Radiance Fields

Jack Naylor, Viorela Ila, Donald G. Dansereau

Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Workshops, 2026

pdf project page arxiv code poster

@article{naylor2026surf,
  author = {Naylor, Jack and Ila, Viorela and Dansereau, Donald G.},
  title = {Surf-NeRF: Surface Regularised Neural Radiance Fields},
  journal = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Workshops},
  year = {2026},
  pages = {258-268}
}

A 3D Reconstruction Benchmark for Asset Inspection

James L. Gray, Nikolai Goncharov, Alexandre Cardaillac, Ryan Griffiths, Jack Naylor, Donald G. Dansereau

arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.17358, 2026

project page arxiv

@article{gray2026benchmark,
  author = {Gray, James L. and Goncharov, Nikolai and Cardaillac, Alexandre and Griffiths, Ryan and Naylor, Jack and Dansereau, Donald G.},
  title = {A 3D Reconstruction Benchmark for Asset Inspection},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.17358},
  year = {2026}
}

Mixing Data-driven and Geometric Models for Satellite Docking Port State Estimation using an RGB or Event Camera

Cedric Le Gentil, Jack Naylor, Nuwan Munasinghe, Jasprabhjit Mehami, Benny Dai, Mikhail Asavkin, Donald G Dansereau, Teresa Vidal-Calleja

2025 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2025

project page arxiv

@article{gentil2025mixing,
  author = {Gentil, Cedric Le and Naylor, Jack and Munasinghe, Nuwan and Mehami, Jasprabhjit and Dai, Benny and Asavkin, Mikhail and Dansereau, Donald G and Vidal-Calleja, Teresa},
  title = {Mixing Data-driven and Geometric Models for Satellite Docking Port State Estimation using an RGB or Event Camera},
  journal = {2025 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
  year = {2025},
  organization = {IEEE}
}

Appearance-aware Trajectory Optimisation for Autonomous On-Orbit Inspection

Raghav Mishra, Jack Naylor, Nicholas H Barbara, Donald G Dansereau

International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and Automation in Space (i-SAIRAS), 2024

pdf

@article{mishra2024apaware,
  author = {Mishra, Raghav and Naylor, Jack and Barbara, Nicholas H and Dansereau, Donald G},
  title = {Appearance-aware Trajectory Optimisation for Autonomous On-Orbit Inspection},
  journal = {International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and Automation in Space (i-SAIRAS)},
  year = {2024}
}

Adaptive Keyframe Selection for Online Iterative NeRF Construction

Joshua Wilkinson, Jack Naylor, Ryan Griffiths, Donald G Dansereau

RoboNerF: 1st Workshop On Neural Fields In Robotics at ICRA 2024, 2024 (Spotlight)

pdf poster

@inproceedings{wilkinson2024adaptive,
  author = {Wilkinson, Joshua and Naylor, Jack and Griffiths, Ryan and Dansereau, Donald G},
  title = {Adaptive Keyframe Selection for Online Iterative NeRF Construction},
  booktitle = {RoboNerF: 1st Workshop On Neural Fields In Robotics at ICRA 2024},
  year = {2024}
}

Towards Event-Based Satellite Docking: A Photometrically Accurate Low-Earth Orbit Hardware Simulation

Nuwan Munasinghe, Cedric Le Gentil, Jack Naylor, Mikhail Asavkin, Donald G Dansereau, Teresa Vidal-Calleja

HERMES2 Workshop at ICRA2024, 2024 (Spotlight)

pdf

@inproceedings{munasinghe2024towards,
  author = {Munasinghe, Nuwan and Le Gentil, Cedric and Naylor, Jack and Asavkin, Mikhail and Dansereau, Donald G and Vidal-Calleja, Teresa},
  title = {Towards Event-Based Satellite Docking: A Photometrically Accurate Low-Earth Orbit Hardware Simulation},
  booktitle = {HERMES2 Workshop at ICRA2024},
  year = {2024}
}

NOCaL: Calibration-Free Semi-Supervised Learning of Odometry and Camera Intrinsics

Ryan Griffiths, Jack Naylor, Donald G. Dansereau

2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2023

project page arxiv code poster

@inproceedings{griffiths2022nocal,
  author = {Griffiths, Ryan and Naylor, Jack and Dansereau, Donald G.},
  title = {NOCaL: Calibration-Free Semi-Supervised Learning of Odometry and Camera Intrinsics},
  booktitle = {2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
  year = {2023},
  pages = {4056–4062},
  organization = {IEEE}
}