Volume 27 (2008)
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Item Agile Spectrum Imaging: Programmable Wavelength Modulation for Cameras and Projectors(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2008) Mohan, Ankit; Raskar, Ramesh; Tumblin, JackWe advocate the use of quickly-adjustable, computer-controlled color spectra in photography, lighting and displays. We present an optical relay system that allows mechanical or electronic color spectrum control and use it to modify a conventional camera and projector. We use a diffraction grating to disperse the rays into different colors, and introduce a mask (or LCD/DMD) in the optical path to modulate the spectrum. We analyze the trade-offs and limitations of this design, and demonstrate its use in a camera, projector and light source. We propose applications such as adaptive color primaries, metamer detection, scene contrast enhancement, photographing fluorescent objects, and high dynamic range photography using spectrum modulation.Item Rendering Trees with Indirect Lighting in Real Time(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2008) Boulanger, K.; Bouatouch, K.; Pattanaik, S.High quality lighting is one of the challenges for interactive tree rendering. To this end, this paper presents a lighting model allowing real-time rendering of trees with convincing indirect lighting. Rather than defining an empirical model to mimic lighting of real trees, we work at a lower level by modeling the spatial distribution of leaves and by assigning them probabilistic properties. We focus mainly on precise low-frequency lighting that our eyes are more sensitive to and we add high-frequency details afterwards. The resulting model is efficient and simple to implement on a GPU.Item Exaggerating Character Motions Using Sub-Joint Hierarchy(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2008) Kwon, Ji-yong; Lee, In-KwonMotion capture cannot generate cartoon-style animation directly. We emulate the rubber-like exaggerations common in traditional character animation as a means of converting motion capture data into cartoon-like movement. We achieve this using trajectory-based motion exaggeration while allowing the violation of link-length constraints. We extend this technique to obtain smooth, rubber-like motion by dividing the original links into shorter sub-links and computing the positions of joints using Bezier curve interpolation and a mass-spring simulation. This method is fast enough to be used in real time.Item Preface, Table of Contents, Cover(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing, Inc, 2008)Item New EUROGRAPHICS Fellows(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2008)Item Image-Based Surface Compression(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2008) Ochotta, Tilo; Saupe, DietmarWe present a generic framework for compression of densely sampled three-dimensional (3D) surfaces in order to satisfy the increasing demand for storing large amounts of 3D content. We decompose a given surface into patches that are parameterized as elevation maps over planar domains and resampled on regular grids. The resulting shaped images are encoded using a state-of-the-art wavelet image coder. We show that our method is not only applicable to mesh- and point-based geometry, but also outperforms current surface encoders for both primitives.Item Adaptive Surface Texture Synthesis Using Round-Shaped Neighbourhoods(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2008) Chen, D.; Dong, F.This paper presents a novel surface texture synthesis method, which is capable of producing high-quality results by performing the synthesis within an effective multi-resolution scheme using an adaptive texture similarity metric. Compared with related works, our method allows us to directly carry out multi-resolution synthesis without involving complicated operations such as mesh hierarchy and partitioning on the target surface. Also, the adaptive similarity metric focuses on measuring texture properties at different scales ranging from local to global, allowing for consistency within differently-sized texture structures. Further, with the introduced round shaped neighbourhoods, we can save considerable amount of computation for the surface texture synthesis over variable texture directions. Experimental results are provided and comparisons are made against other latest works.Item Ray Casting Algebraic Surfaces using the Frustum Form(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2008) Reimers, Martin; Seland, JohanWe propose an algorithm for interactive ray-casting of algebraic surfaces of high degree. A key point of our approach is a polynomial form adapted to the view frustum. This so called frustum form yields simple expressions for the Bernstein form of the ray equations, which can be computed efficiently using matrix products and pre-computed quantities. Numerical root-finding is performed using B-spline and Bezier techniques, and we compare the performances of recent and classical algorithms. Furthermore, we propose a simple and fairly efficient anti-aliasing scheme, based on a combination of screen space and object space techniques. We show how our algorithms can be implemented on streaming architectures with single precision, and demonstrate interactive frame-rates for degrees up to 16.Item Real-time Animation of Sand-Water Interaction(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2008) Rungjiratananon, Witawat; Szego, Zoltan; Kanamori, Yoshihiro; Nishita, TomoyukiRecent advances in physically-based simulations have made it possible to generate realistic animations. However, in the case of solid-fluid coupling, wetting effects have rarely been noticed despite their visual importance especially in interactions between fluids and granular materials.This paper presents a simple particle-based method to model the physical mechanism of wetness propagating through granular materials; Fluid particles are absorbed in the spaces between the granular particles and these wetted granular particles then stick together due to liquid bridges that are caused by surface tension and which will subsequently disappear when over-wetting occurs. Our method can handle these phenomena by introducing a wetness value for each granular particle and by integrating those aspects of behavior that are dependent on wetness into the simulation framework. Using this method, a GPU-based simulator can achieve highly dynamic animations that include wetting effects in real time.Item Simulation of Human Motion Data using Short-Horizon Model-Predictive Control(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2008) Da Silva, M.; Abe, Y.; Popovic, J.Many data-driven animation techniques are capable of producing high quality motions of human characters. Few techniques, however, are capable of generating motions that are consistent with physically simulated environments. Physically simulated characters, in contrast, are automatically consistent with the environment, but their motions are often unnatural because they are difficult to control. We present a model-predictive controller that yields natural motions by guiding simulated humans toward real motion data. During simulation, the predictive component of the controller solves a quadratic program to compute the forces for a short window of time into the future. These forces are then applied by a low-gain proportional-derivative component, which makes minor adjustments until the next planning cycle. The controller is fast enough for interactive systems such as games and training simulations. It requires no precomputation and little manual tuning. The controller is resilient to mismatches between the character dynamics and the input motion, which allows it to track motion capture data even where the real dynamics are not known precisely. The same principled formulation can generate natural walks, runs, and jumps in a number of different physically simulated surroundings.Item Geometry-Aware Framebuffer Level of Detail(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2008) Yang, Lei; Sander, Pedro V.; Lawrence, JasonThis paper introduces a framebuffer level of detail algorithm for controlling the pixel workload in an interactive rendering application. Our basic strategy is to evaluate the shading in a low resolution buffer and, in a second rendering pass, resample this buffer at the desired screen resolution. The size of the lower resolution buffer provides a trade-off between rendering time and the level of detail in the final shading. In order to reduce approximation error we use a feature-preserving reconstruction technique that more faithfully approximates the shading near depth and normal discontinuities. We also demonstrate how intermediate components of the shading can be selectively resized to provide finer-grained control over resource allocation. Finally, we introduce a simple control mechanism that continuously adjusts the amount of resizing necessary to maintain a target framerate. These techniques do not require any preprocessing, are straightforward to implement on modern GPUs, and are shown to provide significant performance gains for several pixel-bound scenes.Item Sample Based Visibility for Soft Shadows using Alias-free Shadow Maps(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2008) Sintorn, Erik; Eisemann, Elmar; Assarsson, UlfThis paper introduces an accurate real-time soft shadow algorithm that uses sample based visibility. Initially, we present a GPU-based alias-free hard shadow map algorithm that typically requires only a single render pass from the light, in contrast to using depth peeling and one pass per layer. For closed objects, we also suppress the need for a bias. The method is extended to soft shadow sampling for an arbitrarily shaped area-/volumetric light source using 128-1024 light samples per screen pixel. The alias-free shadow map guarantees that the visibility is accurately sampled per screen-space pixel, even for arbitrarily shaped (e.g. non-planar) surfaces or solid objects. Another contribution is a smooth coherent shading model to avoid common light leakage near shadow borders due to normal interpolation.Item iCheat: A Representation for Artistic Control of Indirect Cinematic Lighting(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2008) Obert, Juraj; Krivanek, Jaroslav; Pellacini, Fabio; Sykora, Daniel; Pattanaik, SumantaThanks to an increase in rendering efficiency, indirect illumination has recently begun to be integrated in cinematic lighting design, an application where physical accuracy is less important than careful control of scene appearance. This paper presents a comprehensive, efficient, and intuitive representation for artistic control of indirect illumination. We encode user s adjustments to indirect lighting as scale and offset coefficients of the transfer operator. We take advantage of the nature of indirect illumination and of the edits themselves to efficiently sample and compress them. A major benefit of this sampled representation, compared to encoding adjustments as procedural shaders, is the renderer-independence. This allowed us to easily implement several tools to produce our final images: an interactive relighting engine to view adjustments, a painting interface to define them, and a final renderer to render high quality results. We demonstrate edits to scenes with diffuse and glossy surfaces and animation.Item The Beam Radiance Estimate for Volumetric Photon Mapping(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2008) Jarosz, Wojciech; Zwicker, Matthias; Jensen, Henrik WannWe present a new method for efficiently simulating the scattering of light within participating media. Using a theoretical reformulation of volumetric photon mapping, we develop a novel photon gathering technique for participating media. Traditional volumetric photon mapping samples the in-scattered radiance at numerous points along the length of a single ray by performing costly range queries within the photon map. Our technique replaces these multiple point-queries with a single beam-query, which explicitly gathers all photons along the length of an entire ray. These photons are used to estimate the accumulated in-scattered radiance arriving from a particular direction and need to be gathered only once per ray. Our method handles both fixed and adaptive kernels, is faster than regular volumetric photon mapping, and produces images with less noise.Item Discrete Distortion in Triangulated 3-Manifolds(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2008) Mesmoudi, Mohammed Mostefa; De Floriani, Leila; Port, UmbertoWe introduce a novel notion, that we call discrete distortion, for a triangulated 3-manifold. Discrete distortion naturally generalizes the notion of concentrated curvature defined for triangulated surfaces and provides a powerful tool to understand the local geometry and topology of 3-manifolds. Discrete distortion can be viewed as a discrete approach to Ricci curvature for singular flat manifolds. We distinguish between two kinds of distortion, namely, vertex distortion, which is associated with the vertices of the tetrahedral mesh decomposing the 3-manifold, and bond distortion, which is associated with the edges of the tetrahedral mesh. We investigate properties of vertex and bond distortions. As an example, we visualize vertex distortion on manifold hypersurfaces in R4 defined by a scalar field on a 3D mesh. distance fields.Item Illustrative Parallel Coordinates(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2008) McDonnell, Kevin T.; Mueller, Klaus; A. Vilanova, A. Telea, G. Scheuermann, and T. MoellerIllustrative parallel coordinates (IPC) is a suite of artistic rendering techniques for augmenting and improving parallel coordinate (PC) visualizations. IPC techniques can be used to convey a large amount of information about a multidimensional dataset in a small area of the screen through the following approaches: (a) edge-bundling through splines; (b) visualization of "branched" clusters to reveal the distribution of the data; (c) opacity-based hints to show cluster density; (d) opacity and shading effects to illustrate local line density on the parallel axes; and (e) silhouettes, shadows and halos to help the eye distinguish between overlapping clusters. Thus, the primary goal of this work is to convey as much information as possible in a manner that is aesthetically pleasing and easy to understand for non-experts.Item Visualizing Underwater Ocean Optics(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2008) Gutierrez, Diego; Seron, Francisco J.; Munoz, Adolfo; Anson, OscarSimulating the in-water ocean light field is a daunting task. Ocean waters are one of the richest participating media, where light interacts not only with water molecules, but with suspended particles and organic matter as well. The concentration of each constituent greatly affects these interactions, resulting in very different hues. Inelastic scattering events such as fluorescence or Raman scattering imply energy transfers that are usually neglected in the simulations. Our contributions in this paper are a bio-optical model of ocean waters suitable for computer graphics simulations, along with an improved method to obtain an accurate solution of the in-water light field based on radiative transfer theory. The method provides a link between the inherent optical properties that define the medium and its apparent optical properties, which describe how it looks. The bio-optical model of the ocean uses published data from oceanography studies. For inelastic scattering we compute all frequency changes at higher and lower energy values, based on the spectral quantum efficiency function of the medium. The results shown prove the usability of the system as a predictive rendering algorithm. Areas of application for this research span from underwater imagery to remote sensing; the resolution method is general enough to be usable in any type of participating medium simulation.Item Computing Local Signed Distance Fields for Large Polygonal Models(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2008) Chang, Byungjoon; Cha, Deukhyun; Ihm, Insung; A. Vilanova, A. Telea, G. Scheuermann, and T. MoellerThe signed distance field for a polygonal model is a useful representation that facilitates efficient computation in many visualization and geometric processing tasks. Often it is more effective to build a local distance field only within a narrow band around the surface that holds local geometric information for the model. In this paper, we present a novel technique to construct a volumetric local signed distance field of a polygonal model. To compute the local field efficiently, exactly those cells that cross the polygonal surface are found first through a new voxelization method, building a list of intersecting triangles for each boundary cell. After their neighboring cells are classified, the triangle lists are exploited to compute the local signed distance field with minimized voxel-totriangle distance computations. While several efficient methods for computing the distance field, particularly those harnessing the graphics processing unit's (GPU's) processing power, have recently been proposed, we focus on a CPU-based technique, intended to deal flexibly with large polygonal models and high-resolution grids that are often too bulky for GPU computation.Item A Flexible Kernel for Adaptive Mesh Refinement on GPU(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2008) Boubekeur, T.; Schlick, C.We present a flexible GPU kernel for adaptive on-the-fly refinement of meshes with arbitrary topology. By simply reserving a small amount of GPU memory to store a set of adaptive refinement patterns, on-the-fly refinement is performed by the GPU, without any preprocessing nor additional topology data structure. The level of adaptive refinement can be controlled by specifying a per-vertex depth-tag, in addition to usual position, normal, color and texture coordinates. This depth-tag is used by the kernel to instanciate the correct refinement pattern, which will map a refined connectivity on the input coarse polygon. Finally, the refined patch produced for each triangle can be displaced by the vertex shader, using any kind of geometric refinement, such as Bezier patch smoothing, scalar valued displacement, procedural geometry synthesis or subdivision surfaces. This refinement engine does neither require multipass rendering nor any use of fragment processing nor special preprocess of the input mesh structure. It can be implemented on any GPU with vertex shading capabilities.Item Visual Clustering in Parallel Coordinates(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2008) Zhou, Hong; Yuan, Xiaoru; Qu, Huamin; Cui, Weiwei; Chen, Baoquan; A. Vilanova, A. Telea, G. Scheuermann, and T. MoellerParallel coordinates have been widely applied to visualize high-dimensional and multivariate data, discerning patterns within the data through visual clustering. However, the effectiveness of this technique on large data is reduced by edge clutter. In this paper, we present a novel framework to reduce edge clutter, consequently improving the effectiveness of visual clustering. We exploit curved edges and optimize the arrangement of these curved edges by minimizing their curvature and maximizing the parallelism of adjacent edges. The overall visual clustering is improved by adjusting the shape of the edges while keeping their relative order. The experiments on several representative datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.