29-Issue 2

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https://diglib.eg.org/handle/10.2312/153

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SoundRiver: Semantically-Rich Sound Illustration
(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2010) Jaenicke, H.; Borgo, R.; Mason, J. S. D.; Chen, M.
Sound is an integral part of most movies and videos. In many situations, viewers of a video are unable to hear the sound track, for example, when watching it in a fast forward mode, viewing it by hearing-impaired viewers or when the plot is given as a storyboard. In this paper, we present an automated visualization solution to such problems. The system first detects the common components (such as music, speech, rain, explosions, and so on) from a sound track, then maps them to a collection of programmable visual metaphors, and generates a composite visualization. This form of sound visualization, which is referred to as SoundRiver, can be also used to augment various forms of video abstraction and annotated key frames and to enhance graphical user interfaces for video handling software. The SoundRiver conveys more semantic information to the viewer than traditional graphical representations of sound illustration, such as phonoautographs, spectrograms or artistic audiovisual animations.
Scalable Height Field Self-Shadowing
(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2010) Timonen, Ville; Westerholm, Jan
We present a new method suitable for general purpose graphics processing units to render self-shadows on dynamic height fields under dynamic light environments in real-time. Visibility for each point in the height field is determined as the exact horizon for a set of azimuthal directions in time linear in height field size and the number of directions. The surface is shaded using the horizon information and a high-resolution light environment extracted on-line from a high dynamic range cube map, allowing for detailed extended shadows. The desired accuracy for any geometric content and lighting complexity can be matched by choosing a suitable number of azimuthal directions. Our method is able to represent arbitrary features of both high- and low-frequency, unifying hard and soft shadowing. We achieve 23 fps on 1024x1024 height fields with 64 azimuthal directions under a 256x64 environment lighting on an Nvidia GTX 280 GPU.
The Virtual Director: a Correlation-Based Online Viewing of Human Motion
(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2010) Assa, J.; Wolf, L.; Cohen-Or, D.
Automatic camera control for scenes depicting human motion is an imperative topic in motion capture base animation, computer games, and other animation based fields. This challenging control problem is complex and combines both geometric constraints, visibility requirements, and aesthetic elements. Therefore, existing optimization-based approaches for human action overview are often too demanding for online computation.In this paper, we introduce an effective automatic camera control which is extremely efficient and allows online performance. Rather than optimizing a complex quality measurement, at each time it selects one active camera from a multitude of cameras that render the dynamic scene. The selection is based on the correlation between each view stream and the human motion in the scene. Two factors allow for rapid selection among tens of candidate views in real-time, even for complex multi-character scenes: the efficient rendering of the multitude of view streams, and optimized calculations of the correlations using modified CCA. In addition to the method s simplicity and speed, it exhibits good agreement with both cinematic idioms and previous human motion camera control work. Our evaluations show that the method is able to cope with the challenges put forth by severe occlusions, multiple characters and complex scenes.
Fast High-Dimensional Filtering Using the Permutohedral Lattice
(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2010) Adams, Andrew; Baek, Jongmin; Davis, Myers Abraham
Many useful algorithms for processing images and geometry fall under the general framework of high-dimensional Gaussian filtering. This family of algorithms includes bilateral filtering and non-local means. We propose a new way to perform such filters using the permutohedral lattice, which tessellates high-dimensional space with uniform simplices. Our algorithm is the first implementation of a high-dimensional Gaussian filter that is both linear in input size and polynomial in dimensionality. Furthermore it is parameter-free, apart from the filter size, and achieves a consistently high accuracy relative to ground truth (> 45 dB). We use this to demonstrate a number of interactive-rate applications of filters in as high as eight dimensions.
Bidirectional Search for Interactive Motion Synthesis
(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2010) Lo, Wan-Yen; Zwicker, Matthias
We present an approach to improve the search efficiency for near-optimal motion synthesis using motion graphs. An optimal or near-optimal path through a motion graph often leads to the most intuitive result. However, finding such a path can be computationally expensive. Our main contribution is a bidirectional search algorithm. We dynamically divide the search space evenly and merge two search trees to obtain the final solution. This cuts the maximum search depth almost in half and leads to significant speedup. To illustrate the benefits of our approach, we present an interactive sketching interface that allows users to specify complex motions quickly and intuitively.
Deformation Transfer to Multi-Component Objects
(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2010) Zhou, Kun; Xu, Weiwei; Tong, Yiying; Desbrun, Mathieu
We present a simple and effective algorithm to transfer deformation between surface meshes with multiple components. The algorithm automatically computes spatial relationships between components of the target object, builds correspondences between source and target, and finally transfers deformation of the source onto the target while preserving cohesion between the target s components. We demonstrate the versatility of our approach on various complex models.
Rendering Wave Effects with Augmented Light Field
(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2010) Oh, Se Baek; Kashyap, Sriram; Garg, Rohit; Chandran, Sharat; Raskar, Ramesh
Ray-based representations can model complex light transport but are limited in modeling diffraction effects that require the simulation of wavefront propagation. This paper provides a new paradigm that has the simplicity of light path tracing and yet provides an accurate characterization of both Fresnel and Fraunhofer diffraction. We introduce the concept of a light field transformer at the interface of transmissive occluders. This generates mathematically sound, virtual, and possibly negative-valued light sources after the occluder. From a rendering perspective the only simple change is that radiance can be temporarily negative. We demonstrate the correctness of our approach both analytically, as well by comparing values with standard experiments in physics such as the Young s double slit. Our implementation is a shader program in OpenGL that can generate wave effects on arbitrary surfaces.
Mesh Snapping: Robust Interactive Mesh Cutting Using Fast Geodesic Curvature Flow
(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2010) Zhang, Juyong; Wu, Chunlin; Cai, Jianfei; Zheng, Jianmin; Tai, Xue-cheng
This paper considers the problem of interactively finding the cutting contour to extract components from a given mesh. Some existing methods support cuts of arbitrary shape but require careful and tedious input from the user. Others need little user input however they are sensitive to user input and need a postprocessing step to smooth the generated jaggy cutting contours. The popular geometric snake can be used to optimize the cutting contour, but it cannot deal with the topology change. In this paper, we propose a geodesic curvature flow based framework to overcome all these problems. Since in many cases the meaningful cutting contour on a 3D mesh is locally shortest in the sense of some weighted curve length, the geodesic curvature flow is an ideal tool for our problem. It evolves the cutting contour to the nearby local minimum. We should mention that the previous numerical scheme, discretized geodesic curvature flow (dGCF) is too slow and has not been applied to mesh segmentation. With a careful observation to dGCF, we devise here a fast computation scheme called fast geodesic curvature flow (FGCF), which only needs to solve a smaller and easier problem. The initial cutting contour is generated by a variant of random walks algorithm, which is very fast and gives reasonable cutting result with little user input. Experiment results on the benchmark mesh segmentation data set show that our proposed framework is robust to user input and capable of producing good results reflecting geometric features and human shape perception.
BetweenIT: An Interactive Tool for Tight Inbetweening
(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2010) Whited, Brian; Noris, Gioacchino; Simmons, Maryann; Sumner, Robert W.; Gross, Markus; Rossignac, Jarek
The generation of inbetween frames that interpolate a given set of key frames is a major component in the production of a 2D feature animation. Our objective is to considerably reduce the cost of the inbetweening phase by offering an intuitive and effective interactive environment that automates inbetweening when possible while allowing the artist to guide, complement, or override the results. Tight inbetweens, which interpolate similar key frames, are particularly time-consuming and tedious to draw. Therefore, we focus on automating these high-precision and expensive portions of the process. We have designed a set of user-guided semi-automatic techniques that fit well with current practice and minimize the number of required artist-gestures. We present a novel technique for stroke interpolation from only two keys which combines a stroke motion constructed from logarithmic spiral vertex trajectories with a stroke deformation based on curvature averaging and twisting warps. We discuss our system in the context of a feature animation production environment and evaluate our approach with real production data.
Improved Variational Guiding of Smoke Animations
(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2010) Nielsen, Michael B.; Christensen, Brian B.
Smoke animations are hard to art-direct because simple changes in parameters such as simulation resolution often lead to unpredictable changes in the final result. Previous work has addressed this problem with a guiding approach which couples low-resolution simulations - that exhibit the desired flow and behaviour - to the final, high-resolution simulation. This is done in such a way that the desired low frequency features are to some extent preserved in the high-resolution simulation. However, the steady (i.e. constant) guiding used often leads to a lack of sufficiently high detail, and employing time-dependent guiding is expensive because the matrix of the resulting set of equations needs to be recomputed at every iteration. We propose an improved mathematical model for Eulerian-based simulations which is better suited for dynamic, time-dependent guiding of smoke animations through a novel variational coupling of the low- and high-resolution simulations. Our model results in a matrix that does not require re-computation when the guiding changes over time, and hence we can employ time-dependent guiding more efficiently both in terms of storage and computational requirements. We demonstrate that time-dependent guiding allows for more high frequency detail to develop without losing correspondence to the low resolution simulation. Furthermore, we explore various artistic effects made possible by time-dependent guiding.
A Hybrid Approach to Multiple Fluid Simulation using Volume Fractions
(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2010) Kang, Nahyup; Park, Jinho; Noh, Junyong; Shin, Sung Yong
This paper presents a hybrid approach to multiple fluid simulation that can handle miscible and immiscible fluids, simultaneously. We combine distance functions and volume fractions to capture not only the discontinuous interface between immiscible fluids but also the smooth transition between miscible fluids. Our approach consists of four steps: velocity field computation, volume fraction advection, miscible fluid diffusion, and visualization. By providing a combining scheme between volume fractions and level set functions, we are able to take advantages of both representation schemes of fluids. From the system point of view, our work is the first approach to Eulerian grid-based multiple fluid simulation including both miscible and immiscible fluids. From the technical point of view, our approach addresses the issues arising from variable density and viscosity together with material diffusion. We show that the effectiveness of our approach to handle multiple miscible and immiscible fluids through experiments.
Mesh Decomposition with Cross-Boundary Brushes
(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2010) Zheng, Youyi; Tai, Chiew-Lan
We present a new intuitive UI, which we call cross-boundary brushes, for interactive mesh decomposition. The user roughly draws one or more strokes across a desired cut and our system automatically returns a best cut running through all the strokes. By the different natures of part components (i.e., semantic parts) and patch components (i.e., flatter surface patches) in general models, we design two corresponding brushes: part-brush and patch-brush. These two types of brushes share a common user interface, enabling easy switch between them. The part-brush executes a cut along an isoline of a harmonic field driven by the user-specified strokes. We show that the inherent smoothness of the harmonic field together with a carefully designed isoline selection scheme lead to segmentation results that are insensitive to noise, pose, tessellation and variation in user s strokes. Our patch-brush uses a novel facet-based surface metric that alleviates sensitivity to noise and fine details common in region-growing algorithms. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our cutting tools can produce user-desired segmentations for a wide variety of models even with single strokes. We also show that our tools outperform the state-of-art interactive segmentation tools in terms of ease of use and segmentation quality.
Synthesis of Responsive Motion Using a Dynamic Model
(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2010) Ye, Yuting; Liu, C. Karen
Synthesizing the movements of a responsive virtual character in the event of unexpected perturbations has proven a difficult challenge. To solve this problem, we devise a fully automatic method that learns a nonlinear probabilistic model of dynamic responses from very few perturbed walking sequences. This model is able to synthesize responses and recovery motions under new perturbations different from those in the training examples. When perturbations occur, we propose a physics-based method that initiates motion transitions to the most probable response example based on the dynamic states of the character. Our algorithm can be applied to any motion sequences without the need for preprocessing such as segmentation or alignment. The results show that three perturbed motion clips can sufficiently generate a variety of realistic responses, and 14 clips can create a responsive virtual character that reacts realistically to external forces in different directions applied on different body parts at different moments in time.
gProximity: Hierarchical GPU-based Operations for Collision and Distance Queries
(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2010) Lauterbach, C.; Mo, Q.; Manocha, D.
We present novel parallel algorithms for collision detection and separation distance computation for rigid and deformable models that exploit the computational capabilities of many-core GPUs. Our approach uses thread and data parallelism to perform fast hierarchy construction, updating, and traversal using tight-fitting bounding volumes such as oriented bounding boxes (OBB) and rectangular swept spheres (RSS). We also describe efficient algorithms to compute a linear bounding volume hierarchy (LBVH) and update them using refitting methods. Moreover, we show that tight-fitting bounding volume hierarchies offer improved performance on GPU-like throughput architectures. We use our algorithms to perform discrete and continuous collision detection including self-collisions, as well as separation distance computation between non-overlapping models. In practice, our approach (gProximity) can perform these queries in a few milliseconds on a PC with NVIDIA GTX 285 card on models composed of tens or hundreds of thousands of triangles used in cloth simulation, surgical simulation, virtual prototyping and N-body simulation. Moreover, we observe more than an order of magnitude performance improvement over prior GPU-based algorithms.
Continuum Traffic Simulation
(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2010) Sewall, J.; Wilkie, D.; Merrell, P.; Lin, M. C.
We present a novel method for the synthesis and animation of realistic traffic flows on large-scale road networks. Our technique is based on a continuum model of traffic flow we extend to correctly handle lane changes and merges, as well as traffic behaviors due to changes in speed limit. We demonstrate how our method can be applied to the animation of many vehicles in a large-scale traffic network at interactive rates and show that our method can simulate believable traffic flows on publicly-available, real-world road data. We furthermore demonstrate the scalability of this technique on many-core systems.
Hybrid Simulation of Miscible Mixing with Viscous Fingering
(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2010) Shin, Seung-Ho; Kam, Hyeong Ryeol; Kim, Chang-Hun
By modeling mass transfer phenomena, we simulate solids and liquids dissolving or changing to other substances. We also deal with the very small-scale phenomena that occur when a fluid spreads out at the interface of another fluid. We model the pressure at the interfaces between fluids with Darcy s Law and represent the viscous fingering phenomenon in which a fluid interface spreads out with a fractal-like shape. We use hybrid grid-based simulation and smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) to simulate intermolecular diffusion and attraction using particles at a computable scale. We have produced animations showing fluids mixing and objects dissolving.
Procedural Generation of Roads
(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2010) Galin, E.; Peytavie, A.; Marechal, N.; Guerin, E.
In this paper, we propose an automatic method for generating roads based on a weighted anisotropic shortest path algorithm. Given an input scene, we automatically create a path connecting an initial and a final point. The trajectory of the road minimizes a cost function that takes into account the different parameters of the scene including the slope of the terrain, natural obstacles such as rivers, lakes, mountains and forests. The road is generated by excavating the terrain along the path and instantiating generic parameterized models.
Adding Depth to Cartoons Using Sparse Depth (In)equalities
(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2010) Sykora, D.; Sedlacek, D.; Jinchao, S.; Dingliana, J.; Collins, S.
This paper presents a novel interactive approach for adding depth information into hand-drawn cartoon images and animations. In comparison to previous depth assignment techniques our solution requires minimal user effort and enables creation of consistent pop-ups in a matter of seconds. Inspired by perceptual studies we formulate a custom tailored optimization framework that tries to mimic the way that a human reconstructs depth information from a single image. Its key advantage is that it completely avoids inputs requiring knowledge of absolute depth and instead uses a set of sparse depth (in)equalities that are much easier to specify. Since these constraints lead to a solution based on quadratic programming that is time consuming to evaluate we propose a simple approximative algorithm yielding similar results with much lower computational overhead. We demonstrate its usefulness in the context of a cartoon animation production pipeline including applications such as enhancement, registration, composition, 3D modelling and stereoscopic display.
Heat Transfer Simulation for Modeling Realistic Winter Sceneries
(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2010) Marechal, N.; Guerin, E.; Galin, E.; Merillou, S.; Merillou, N.
This paper presents a physically based method for simulating the heat transfers between the different environmental elements to synthesize realistic winter sceneries. We simulate the snow fall over the ground, as well as the conductive, convective and radiative thermal transfers using a finite volume method according to the variations of air and dew point temperatures, the amount of snow, cloud cover and day-night cycles. Our approach takes into account phase changes such as snow melting into water or water freezing into ice.
Interactive High-Quality Visualization of Higher-Order Finite Elements
(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2010) Ueffinger, Markus; Frey, Steffen; Ertl, Thomas
Higher-order finite element methods have emerged as an important discretization scheme for simulation. They are increasingly used in contemporary numerical solvers, generating a new class of data that must be analyzed by scientists and engineers. Currently available visualization tools for this type of data are either batch oriented or limited to certain cell types and polynomial degrees. Other approaches approximate higher-order data by resampling resulting in trade-offs in interactivity and quality. To overcome these limitations, we have developed a distributed visualization system which allows for interactive exploration of non-conforming unstructured grids, resulting from space-time discontinuous Galerkin simulations, in which each cell has its own higher-order polynomial solution. Our system employs GPU-based raycasting for direct volume rendering of complex grids which feature non-convex, curvilinear cells with varying polynomial degree. Frequency-based adaptive sampling accounts for the high variations along rays. For distribution across a GPU cluster, the initial object-space partitioning is determined by cell characteristics like the polynomial degree and is adapted at runtime by a load balancing mechanism. The performance and utility of our system is evaluated for different aeroacoustic simulations involving the propagation of shock fronts.

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