Full Papers 2014 - CGF 33-Issue 2

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https://diglib.eg.org/handle/10.2312/13886

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Accurate and Efficient Lighting for Skinned Models
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2014) Tarini, Marco; Panozzo, Daniele; Sorkine-Hornung, Olga; B. Levy and J. Kautz
In the context of real-time, GPU-based rendering of animated skinned meshes, we propose a new algorithm to compute surface normals with minimal overhead both in terms of the memory footprint and the required per-vertex operations. By accounting for the variation of the skinning weights over the surface, we achieve a higher visual quality compared to the standard approximation ubiquitously used in video-game engines and other real-time applications. Our method supports Linear Blend Skinning and Dual Quaternion Skinning. We demonstrate the advantages of our technique on a variety of datasets and provide a complete open-source implementation, including GLSL shaders.
Optimizing Stereo-to-Multiview Conversion for Autostereoscopic Displays
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2014) Chapiro, Alexandre; Heinzle, Simon; Aydin, Tunç Ozan; Poulakos, Steven; Zwicker, Matthias; Smolic, Aljosa; Gross, Markus; B. Levy and J. Kautz
We present a novel stereo-to-multiview video conversion method for glasses-free multiview displays. Different from previous stereo-to-multiview approaches, our mapping algorithm utilizes the limited depth range of autostereoscopic displays optimally and strives to preserve the scene s artistic composition and perceived depth even under strong depth compression. We first present an investigation of how perceived image quality relates to spatial frequency and disparity. The outcome of this study is utilized in a two-step mapping algorithm, where we (i) compress the scene depth using a non-linear global function to the depth range of an autostereoscopic display, and (ii) enhance the depth gradients of salient objects to restore the perceived depth and salient scene structure. Finally, an adapted image domain warping algorithm is proposed to generate the multiview output, which enables overall disparity range extension.
Interactive Motion Mapping for Real-time Character Control
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2014) Rhodin, Helge; Tompkin, James; Kim, Kwang In; Varanasi, Kiran; Seidel, Hans-Peter; Theobalt, Christian; B. Levy and J. Kautz
Abstract It is now possible to capture the 3D motion of the human body on consumer hardware and to puppet in real time skeleton-based virtual characters. However, many characters do not have humanoid skeletons. Characters such as spiders and caterpillars do not have boned skeletons at all, and these characters have very different shapes and motions. In general, character control under arbitrary shape and motion transformations is unsolved - how might these motions be mapped? We control characters with a method which avoids the rigging-skinning pipeline - source and target characters do not have skeletons or rigs. We use interactively-defined sparse pose correspondences to learn a mapping between arbitrary 3D point source sequences and mesh target sequences. Then, we puppet the target character in real time. We demonstrate the versatility of our method through results on diverse virtual characters with different input motion controllers. Our method provides a fast, flexible, and intuitive interface for arbitrary motion mapping which provides new ways to control characters for real-time animation.
Coded Exposure HDR Light-Field Video Recording
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2014) Schedl, David C.; Birklbauer, Clemens; Bimber, Oliver; B. Levy and J. Kautz
Capturing exposure sequences to compute high dynamic range (HDR) images causes motion blur in cases of camera movement. This also applies to light-field cameras: frames rendered from multiple blurred HDR lightfield perspectives are also blurred. While the recording times of exposure sequences cannot be reduced for a single-sensor camera, we demonstrate how this can be achieved for a camera array. Thus, we decrease capturing time and reduce motion blur for HDR light-field video recording. Applying a spatio-temporal exposure pattern while capturing frames with a camera array reduces the overall recording time and enables the estimation of camera movement within one light-field video frame. By estimating depth maps and local point spread functions (PSFs) from multiple perspectives with the same exposure, regional motion deblurring can be supported. Missing exposures at various perspectives are then interpolated.
Spatio-Temporal Geometry Fusion for Multiple Hybrid Cameras using Moving Least Squares Surfaces
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2014) Kuster, Claudia; Bazin, Jean-Charles; Öztireli, Cengiz; Deng, Teng; Martin, Tobias; Popa, Tiberiu; Gross, Markus; B. Levy and J. Kautz
Multi-view reconstruction aims at computing the geometry of a scene observed by a set of cameras. Accurate 3D reconstruction of dynamic scenes is a key component for a large variety of applications, ranging from special effects to telepresence and medical imaging. In this paper we propose a method based on Moving Least Squares surfaces which robustly and efficiently reconstructs dynamic scenes captured by a calibrated set of hybrid color+depth cameras. Our reconstruction provides spatio-temporal consistency and seamlessly fuses color and geometric information. We illustrate our approach on a variety of real sequences and demonstrate that it favorably compares to state-of-the-art methods.
Flower Reconstruction from a Single Photo
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2014) Yan, Feilong; Gong, Minglun; Cohen-Or, Daniel; Deussen, Oliver; Chen, Baoquan; B. Levy and J. Kautz
We present a semi-automatic method for reconstructing flower models from a single photograph. Such reconstruction is challenging since the 3D structure of a flower can appear ambiguous in projection. However, the flower head typically consists of petals embedded in 3D space that share similar shapes and form certain level of regular structure. Our technique employs these assumptions by first fitting a cone and subsequently a surface of revolution to the flower structure and then computing individual petal shapes from their projection in the photo. Flowers with multiple layers of petals are handled through processing different layers separately. Occlusions are dealt with both within and between petal layers. We show that our method allows users to quickly generate a variety of realistic 3D flowers from photographs and to animate an image using the underlying models reconstructed from our method.
Efficient Enforcement of Hard Articulation Constraints in the Presence of Closed Loops and Contacts
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2014) Tomcin, Robin; Sibbing, Dominik; Kobbelt, Leif; B. Levy and J. Kautz
In rigid body simulation, one must distinguish between contacts (so-called unilateral constraints) and articulations (bilateral constraints). For contacts and friction, iterative solution methods have proven most useful for interactive applications, often in combination with Shock-Propagation in cases with strong interactions between contacts (such as stacks), prioritizing performance and plausibility over accuracy. For articulation constraints, direct solution methods are preferred, because one can rely on a factorization with linear time complexity for tree-like systems, even in ill-conditioned cases caused by large mass-ratios or high complexity. Despite recent advances, combining the advantages of direct and iterative solution methods wrt. performance has proven difficult and the intricacy of articulations in interactive applications is often limited by the convergence speed of the iterative solution method in the presence of closed kinematic loops (i.e. auxiliary constraints) and contacts. We identify common performance bottlenecks in the dynamic simulation of unilateral and bilateral constraints and are able to present a simulation method, that scales well in the number of constraints even in ill-conditioned cases with frictional contacts, collisions and closed loops in the kinematic graph. For cases where many joints are connected to a single body, we propose a technique to increase the sparsity of the positive definite linear system. A solution to these bottlenecks is presented in this paper to make the simulation of a wider range of mechanisms possible in real-time without extensive parameter tuning.
Feedback Control for Rotational Movements in Feature Space
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2014) Borno, Mazen Al; Fiume, Eugene; Hertzmann, A.; Lasa, M. de; B. Levy and J. Kautz
Synthesizing controllers for rotational movements in feature space is an open research problem and is particularly challenging because of the need to precisely regulate the character s global orientation, angular momentum and inertia. This paper presents feature-based controllers for a wide variety of rotational movements, including cartwheels, dives and flips. We show that the controllers can be made robust to large external disturbances by using a time-invariant control scheme. The generality of the control laws is demonstrated by providing examples of the flip controller with different apexes, the diving controller with different heights and styles, the cartwheel controller with different speeds and straddle widths, etc. The controllers do not rely on any input motion or offline optimization.
Self-similarity for Accurate Compression of Point Sampled Surfaces
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2014) Digne, Julie; Chaine, Raphaëlle; Valette, Sébastien; B. Levy and J. Kautz
Most surfaces, be it from a fine-art artifact or a mechanical object, are characterized by a strong self-similarity. This property finds its source in the natural structures of objects but also in the fabrication processes: regularity of the sculpting technique, or machine tool. In this paper, we propose to exploit the self-similarity of the underlying shapes for compressing point cloud surfaces which can contain millions of points at a very high precision. Our approach locally resamples the point cloud in order to highlight the self-similarity of the shape, while remaining consistent with the original shape and the scanner precision. It then uses this self-similarity to create an ad hoc dictionary on which the local neighborhoods will be sparsely represented, thus allowing for a light-weight representation of the total surface. We demonstrate the validity of our approach on several point clouds from finearts and mechanical objects, as well as a urban scene. In addition, we show that our approach also achieves a filtering of noise whose magnitude is smaller than the scanner precision.
Thumbnail Galleries for Procedural Models
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2014) Lienhard, Stefan; Specht, Matthias; Neubert, Boris; Pauly, Mark; Müller, Pascal; B. Levy and J. Kautz
Procedural modeling allows for the generation of innumerable variations of models from a parameterized, conditional or stochastic rule set. Due to the abstractness, complexity and stochastic nature of rule sets, it is often very difficult to have an understanding of the diversity of models that a given rule set defines. We address this problem by presenting a novel system to automatically generate, cluster, rank, and select a series of representative thumbnail images out of a rule set. We introduce a set of view attributes that can be used to measure the suitability of an image to represent a model, and allow for comparison of different models derived from the same rule set. To find the best thumbnails, we exploit these view attributes on images of models obtained by stochastically sampling the parameter space of the rule set. The resulting thumbnail gallery gives a representative visual impression of the procedural modeling potential of the rule set. Performance is discussed by means of a number of distinct examples and compared to state-of-the-art approaches.
Manipulating Refractive and Reflective Binocular Disparity
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2014) Dabala, Lukasz; Kellnhofer, Petr; Ritschel, Tobias; Didyk, Piotr; Templin, Krzysztof; Myszkowski, Karol; Rokita, P.; Seidel, Hans-Peter; B. Levy and J. Kautz
Presenting stereoscopic content on 3D displays is a challenging task, usually requiring manual adjustments. A number of techniques have been developed to aid this process, but they account for binocular disparity of surfaces that are diffuse and opaque only. However, combinations of transparent as well as specular materials are common in the real and virtual worlds, and pose a significant problem. For example, excessive disparities can be created which cannot be fused by the observer. Also, multiple stereo interpretations become possible, e. g., for glass, that both reflects and refracts, which may confuse the observer and result in poor 3D experience. In this work, we propose an efficient method for analyzing and controlling disparities in computer-generated images of such scenes where surface positions and a layer decomposition are available. Instead of assuming a single per-pixel disparity value, we estimate all possibly perceived disparities at each image location. Based on this representation, we define an optimization to find the best per-pixel camera parameters, assuring that all disparities can be easily fused by a human. A preliminary perceptual study indicates, that our approach combines comfortable viewing with realistic depiction of typical specular scenes.
Clean Color: Improving Multi-filament 3D Prints
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2014) Hergel, Jean; Lefebvre, Sylvain; B. Levy and J. Kautz
Fused Filament Fabrication is an additive manufacturing process by which a 3D object is created from plastic filament. The filament is pushed through a hot nozzle where it melts. The nozzle deposits plastic layer after layer to create the final object. This process has been popularized by the RepRap community. Several printers feature multiple extruders, allowing objects to be formed from multiple materials or colors. The extruders are mounted side by side on the printer carriage. However, the print quality suffers when objects with color patterns are printed a disappointment for designers interested in 3D printing their colored digital models. The most severe issue is the oozing of plastic from the idle extruders: Plastics of different colors bleed onto each other giving the surface a smudged aspect, excess strings oozing from the extruder deposit on the surface, and holes appear due to this missing plastic. Fixing this issue is difficult: increasing the printing speed reduces oozing but also degrades surface quality on large prints the required speed level become impractical. Adding a physical mechanism increases cost and print time as extruders travel to a cleaning station. Instead, we rely on software and exploit degrees of freedom of the printing process. We introduce three techniques that complement each other in improving the print quality significantly. We first reduce the impact of oozing plastic by choosing a better azimuth angle for the printed part. We build a disposable rampart in close proximity of the part, giving the extruders the opportunity to wipe oozing strings and refill with hot plastic. We finally introduce a toolpath planner avoiding and hiding most of the defects due to oozing, and seamlessly integrating the rampart. We demonstrate our technique on several challenging multiple color prints, and show that our tool path planner improves the surface finish of single color prints as well.
Pathline Glyphs
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2014) Hlawatsch, Marcel; Sadlo, Filip; Jang, Hajun; Weiskopf, Daniel; B. Levy and J. Kautz
Visualization of pathlines is common and highly relevant for the analysis of unsteady flow. However, pathlines can intersect, leading to visual clutter and perceptual issues. This makes it intrinsically difficult to provide expressive visualizations of the entire domain by an arrangement of multiple pathlines, in contrast to well-established streamline placement techniques. We present an approach to reduce these problems. It is inspired by glyph-based visualization and small multiples: we partition the domain into cells, each corresponding to a downscaled version of the entire domain. Inside these cells, a single downscaled pathline is drawn. On the overview scale, our pathline glyphs lead to emergent visual patterns that provide insight into time-dependent flow behavior. Zooming-in allows us to analyze individual pathlines in detail and compare neighboring lines. The overall approach is complemented with a context-preserving zoom lens and interactive pathline-based exploration. While we primarily target the visualization of 2D flow, we also address the extension to 3D. Our evaluation includes several examples, comparison to other flow visualization techniques, and a user study with domain experts.
4D Video Textures for Interactive Character Appearance
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2014) Casas, Dan; Volino, Marco; Collomosse, John; Hilton, Adrian; B. Levy and J. Kautz
animation from a database of 4D actor performance captured in a multiple camera studio. 4D performance capture reconstructs dynamic shape and appearance over time but is limited to free-viewpoint video replay of the same motion. Interactive animation from 4D performance capture has so far been limited to surface shape only. 4DVT is the final piece in the puzzle enabling video-realistic interactive animation through two contributions: a layered view-dependent texture map representation which supports efficient storage, transmission and rendering from multiple view video capture; and a rendering approach that combines multiple 4DVT sequences in a parametric motion space, maintaining video quality rendering of dynamic surface appearance whilst allowing high-level interactive control of character motion and viewpoint. 4DVT is demonstrated for multiple characters and evaluated both quantitatively and through a user-study which confirms that the visual quality of captured video is maintained. The 4DVT representation achieves >90% reduction in size and halves the rendering cost.
Efficient Monte Carlo Rendering with Realistic Lenses
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2014) Hanika, Johannes; Dachsbacher, Carsten; B. Levy and J. Kautz
In this paper we present a novel approach to simulate image formation for a wide range of real world lenses in the Monte Carlo ray tracing framework. Our approach sidesteps the overhead of tracing rays through a system of lenses and requires no tabulation. To this end we first improve the precision of polynomial optics to closely match ground-truth ray tracing. Second, we show how the Jacobian of the optical system enables efficient importance sampling, which is crucial for difficult paths such as sampling the aperture which is hidden behind lenses on both sides. Our results show that this yields converged images significantly faster than previous methods and accurately renders complex lens systems with negligible overhead compared to simple models, e.g. the thin lens model. We demonstrate the practicality of our method by incorporating it into a bidirectional path tracing framework and show how it can provide information needed for sophisticated light transport algorithms.
Recurring Part Arrangements in Shape Collections
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2014) Zheng, Youyi; Cohen-Or, Daniel; Averkiou, Melinos; Mitra, Niloy J.; B. Levy and J. Kautz
Extracting semantically related parts across models remains challenging, especially without supervision. The common approach is to co-analyze a model collection, while assuming the existence of descriptive geometric features that can directly identify related parts. In the presence of large shape variations, common geometric features, however, are no longer sufficiently descriptive. In this paper, we explore an indirect top-down approach, where instead of part geometry, part arrangements extracted from each model are compared. The key observation is that while a direct comparison of part geometry can be ambiguous, part arrangements, being higher level structures, remain consistent, and hence can be used to discover latent commonalities among semantically related shapes. We show that our indirect analysis leads to the detection of recurring arrangements of parts, which are otherwise difficult to discover in a direct unsupervised setting. We evaluate our algorithm on ground truth datasets and report advantages over geometric similarity-based bottom-up co-segmentation algorithms.
Crack-free Rendering of Dynamically Tesselated B-Rep Models
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2014) Claux, Frédéric; Barthe, Loïc; Vanderhaeghe, David; Jessel, Jean-Pierre; Paulin, Mathias; B. Levy and J. Kautz
We propose a versatile pipeline to render B-Rep models interactively, precisely and without rendering-related artifacts such as cracks. Our rendering method is based on dynamic surface evaluation using both tesselation and ray-casting, and direct GPU surface trimming. An initial rendering of the scene is performed using dynamic tesselation. The algorithm we propose reliably detects then fills up cracks in the rendered image. Crack detection works in image space, using depth information, while crack-filling is either achieved in image space using a simple classification process, or performed in object space through selective ray-casting. The crack filling method can be dynamically changed at runtime. Our image space crack filling approach has a limited runtime cost and enables high quality, real-time navigation. Our higher quality, object space approach results in a rendering of similar quality than full-scene ray-casting, but is 2 to 6 times faster, can be used during navigation and provides accurate, reliable rendering. Integration of our work with existing tesselation-based rendering engines is straightforward.
Light Montage for Perceptual Image Enhancement
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2014) Hosu, Vlad; Ha, Mai Lan; Sim, Terence; B. Levy and J. Kautz
Recent photography techniques such as sculpting with light show great potential in compositing beautiful images from fixed-viewpoint photos under multiple illuminations. The process relies heavily on the artists experience and skills using the available tools. An apparent trend in recent works is to facilitate the interaction making it less timeconsuming and addressable not only to experts, but also novices. We propose a method that automatically creates enhanced light montages that are comparable to those produced by artists. It detects and emphasizes cues that are important for perception by introducing a technique to extract depth and shape edges from an unconstrained light stack. Studies show that these cues are associated with silhouettes and suggestive contours which artists use to sketch and construct the layout of paintings. Textures, due to perspective distortion, offer essential cues that depict shape and surface slant. We balance the emphasis between depth edges and reflectance textures to enhance the sense of both shape and reflectance properties. Our light montage technique works perfectly with a few to hundreds of illuminations for each scene. Experiments show great results for static scenes making it practical for small objects, interiors and small-scale outdoor scenes. Dynamic scenes may be captured using spatially distributed light setups such as light domes. The approach could also be applied to time-lapse photos, with the sun as the main light source.
Automatic Generation of Tourist Brochures
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2014) Birsak, Michael; Musialski, Przemyslaw; Wonka, Peter; Wimmer, Michael; B. Levy and J. Kautz
We present a novel framework for the automatic generation of tourist brochures that include routing instructions and additional information presented in the form of so-called detail lenses. The first contribution of this paper is the automatic creation of layouts for the brochures. Our approach is based on the minimization of an energy function that combines multiple goals: positioning of the lenses as close as possible to the corresponding region shown in an overview map, keeping the number of lenses low, and an efficient numbering of the lenses. The second contribution is a route-aware simplification of the graph of streets used for traveling between the points of interest (POIs). This is done by reducing the graph consisting of all shortest paths through the minimization of an energy function. The output is a subset of street segments that enable traveling between all the POIs without considerable detours, while at the same time guaranteeing a clutter-free visualization.
SAFE: Structure-aware Facade Editing
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2014) Dang, Minh; Ceylan, Duygu; Neubert, Boris; Pauly, Mark; B. Levy and J. Kautz
Many man-made objects, in particular building facades, exhibit dominant structural relations such as symmetry and regularity. When editing these shapes, a common objective is to preserve these relations. However, often there are numerous plausible editing results that all preserve the desired structural relations of the input, creating ambiguity. We propose an interactive facade editing framework that explores this structural ambiguity. We first analyze the input in a semi-automatic manner to detect different groupings of the facade elements and the relations among them. We then provide an incremental editing process where a set of variations that preserve the detected relations in a particular grouping are generated at each step. Starting from one input example, our system can quickly generate various facade configurations

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