Leyla Kabuli

I am a 4th year PhD student in the Computational Imaging Lab in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) Department at UC Berkeley, advised by Professor Laura Waller. In the past, I worked as an intern at Meta Reality Labs with Grace Kuo, at Apple with Patrick Gill, and at Zendar with Griffin Foster. I was also an undergraduate student at UC Berkeley, where I received a BS in EECS, a BA in Music, and was named UC Berkeley’s Top Graduating Senior of 2021 and the 150th University Medalist. During my undergraduate studies, I was fortunate to be mentored by Professor Steve Conolly in the Berkeley Imaging Systems Laboratory, and Emma Alexander and Professor Laura Waller in the Computational Imaging Lab.

My research is in computational imaging, at the intersection of information theory, machine learning, and optics. I am supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program and the Berkeley Fellowship. Outside of academics, I enjoy playing piano, climbing, cycling, hiking, and skiing.

Research highlights

High contrast holography through dual modulation
Leyla Kabuli, Oliver Cossairt, Florian Schiffers, Nathan Matsuda, and Grace Kuo
Nature Scientific Reports 2025
(paper) / (arXiv)
We propose an architecture for improved image contrast in holographic displays that uses a low-resolution amplitude spatial light modulator and a high-resolution phase spatial light modulator. Dual modulation can improve contrast while maintaining compact form factor.

Information-driven design of imaging systems
Henry Pinkard, Leyla Kabuli, Eric Markley, Tiffany Chien, Jiantao Jiao, and Laura Waller
arXiv
(website) / (arXiv) / (code)
We present a method to measure and optimize how much information imaging systems capture, applicable to diverse systems ranging from consumer cameras to radio telescopes.

Automotive elevation mapping with interferometric synthetic aperture radar
Leyla A. Kabuli and Griffin Foster
arXiv, IEEE CISA 2024 (Oral)
(arXiv) / (paper)
We use low-cost radar arrays and interferometric synthetic aperture radar techniques to create detailed point clouds for real-time low-latency mapping of complex automotive environments.

High-quality lensless imaging with a random multi-focal lenslet phase mask
Leyla Kabuli, Gina Wu, and Laura Waller
COSI 2023 (Oral)
We present a lensless imager with a random multi-focal lenslet phase mask. This imager produces high-quality and high-resolution images with easy alignment and simple reconstruction algorithms with fast convergence.