Volume 37 (2018)

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https://diglib.eg.org/handle/10.2312/2632118

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Interactive Generation of Time-evolving, Snow-Covered Landscapes with Avalanches
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2018) Cordonnier, Guillaume; Ecormier, Pierre; Galin, Eric; Gain, James; Benes, Bedrich; Cani, Marie-Paule; Gutierrez, Diego and Sheffer, Alla
We introduce a novel method for interactive generation of visually consistent, snow-covered landscapes and provide control of their dynamic evolution over time. Our main contribution is the real-time phenomenological simulation of avalanches and other user-guided events, such as tracks left by Nordic skiing, which can be applied to interactively sculpt the landscape. The terrain is modeled as a height field with additional layers for stable, compacted, unstable, and powdery snow, which behave in combination as a semi-viscous fluid. We incorporate the impact of several phenomena, including sunlight, temperature, prevailing wind direction, and skiing activities. The snow evolution includes snow-melt and snow-drift, which a ect stability of the snow mass and the probability of avalanches. A user can shape landscapes and their evolution either with a variety of interactive brushes, or by prescribing events along a winter season time-line. Our optimized GPU-implementation allows interactive updates of snow type and depth across a large (10 10km) terrain, including real-time avalanches, making this suitable for visual assets in computer games. We evaluate our method through perceptual comparison against exiting methods and real snow-depth data.
Feature Curve Co-Completion in Noisy Data
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2018) Gehre, Anne; Lim, Isaak; Kobbelt, Leif; Gutierrez, Diego and Sheffer, Alla
Feature curves on 3D shapes provide important hints about significant parts of the geometry and reveal their underlying structure. However, when we process real world data, automatically detected feature curves are affected by measurement uncertainty, missing data, and sampling resolution, leading to noisy, fragmented, and incomplete feature curve networks. These artifacts make further processing unreliable. In this paper we analyze the global co-occurrence information in noisy feature curve networks to fill in missing data and suppress weakly supported feature curves. For this we propose an unsupervised approach to find meaningful structure within the incomplete data by detecting multiple occurrences of feature curve configurations (cooccurrence analysis). We cluster and merge these into feature curve templates, which we leverage to identify strongly supported feature curve segments as well as to complete missing data in the feature curve network. In the presence of significant noise, previous approaches had to resort to user input, while our method performs fully automatic feature curve co-completion. Finding feature reoccurrences however, is challenging since naïve feature curve comparison fails in this setting due to fragmentation and partial overlaps of curve segments. To tackle this problem we propose a robust method for partial curve matching. This provides us with the means to apply symmetry detection methods to identify co-occurring configurations. Finally, Bayesian model selection enables us to detect and group re-occurrences that describe the data well and with low redundancy.
Maps and Globes in Virtual Reality
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2018) Yang, Yalong; Jenny, Bernhard; Dwyer, Tim; Marriott, Kim; Chen, Haohui; Cordeil, Maxime; Jeffrey Heer and Heike Leitte and Timo Ropinski
This paper explores different ways to render world-wide geographic maps in virtual reality (VR). We compare: (a) a 3D exocentric globe, where the user's viewpoint is outside the globe; (b) a flat map (rendered to a plane in VR); (c) an egocentric 3D globe, with the viewpoint inside the globe; and (d) a curved map, created by projecting the map onto a section of a sphere which curves around the user. In all four visualisations the geographic centre can be smoothly adjusted with a standard handheld VR controller and the user, through a head-tracked headset, can physically move around the visualisation. For distance comparison exocentric globe is more accurate than egocentric globe and flat map. For area comparison more time is required with exocentric and egocentric globes than with flat and curved maps. For direction estimation, the exocentric globe is more accurate and faster than the other visual presentations. Our study participants had a weak preference for the exocentric globe. Generally the curved map had benefits over the flat map. In almost all cases the egocentric globe was found to be the least effective visualisation. Overall, our results provide support for the use of exocentric globes for geographic visualisation in mixed-reality.
Biorthogonal Wavelet Surface Reconstruction Using Partial Integrations
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2018) Ren, Xiaohua; Lyu, Luan; He, Xiaowei; Cao, Wei; Yang, Zhixin; Sheng, Bin; Zhang, Yanci; Wu, Enhua; Fu, Hongbo and Ghosh, Abhijeet and Kopf, Johannes
We introduce a new biorthogonal wavelet approach to creating a water-tight surface defined by an implicit function, from a finite set of oriented points. Our approach aims at addressing problems with previous wavelet methods which are not resilient to missing or nonuniformly sampled data. To address the problems, our approach has two key elements. First, by applying a three-dimensional partial integration, we derive a new integral formula to compute the wavelet coefficients without requiring the implicit function to be an indicator function. It can be shown that the previously used formula is a special case of our formula when the integrated function is an indicator function. Second, a simple yet general method is proposed to construct smooth wavelets with small support. With our method, a family of wavelets can be constructed with the same support size as previously used wavelets while having one more degree of continuity. Experiments show that our approach can robustly produce results comparable to those produced by the Fourier and Poisson methods, regardless of the input data being noisy, missing or nonuniform. Moreover, our approach does not need to compute global integrals or solve large linear systems.
Dynamic Deep Octree for High-resolution Volumetric Painting in Virtual Reality
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2018) Kim, Yeojin; Kim, Byungmoon; Kim, Young J.; Fu, Hongbo and Ghosh, Abhijeet and Kopf, Johannes
With virtual reality, digital painting on 2D canvas is now being extended to 3D space. In this paper, we generalize the 2D pixel canvas to a 3D voxel canvas to allow artists to synthesize volumetric color fields. We develop a deep and dynamic octree-based painting and rendering system using both CPU and GPU to take advantage of the characteristics of both processors (CPU for octree modeling and GPU for volume rendering). On the CPU-side, we dynamically adjust an octree and incrementally update the octree to GPU with low latency without compromising the frame rates of the rendering. Our octree is balanced and uses a novel 3-neighbor connectivity for format simplicity and efficient storage, while allowing constant neighbor access time in ray casting. To further reduce the GPU-side 3-neighbor computations, we precompute a culling mask in CPU and upload it to GPU. Finally, we analyze the numerical error-propagation in ray casting through high resolution octree and present a theoretical error bound.
Robust Physics-based Motion Retargeting with Realistic Body Shapes
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2018) Borno, Mazen Al; Righetti, Ludovic; Black, Michael J.; Delp, Scott L.; Fiume, Eugene; Romero, Javier; Thuerey, Nils and Beeler, Thabo
Motion capture is often retargeted to new, and sometimes drastically different, characters. When the characters take on realistic human shapes, however, we become more sensitive to the motion looking right. This means adapting it to be consistent with the physical constraints imposed by different body shapes. We show how to take realistic 3D human shapes, approximate them using a simplified representation, and animate them so that they move realistically using physically-based retargeting. We develop a novel spacetime optimization approach that learns and robustly adapts physical controllers to new bodies and constraints. The approach automatically adapts the motion of the mocap subject to the body shape of a target subject. This motion respects the physical properties of the new body and every body shape results in a different and appropriate movement. This makes it easy to create a varied set of motions from a single mocap sequence by simply varying the characters. In an interactive environment, successful retargeting requires adapting the motion to unexpected external forces. We achieve robustness to such forces using a novel LQR-tree formulation. We show that the simulated motions look appropriate to each character’'s anatomy and their actions are robust to perturbations.
Sensor-aware Normal Estimation for Point Clouds from 3D Range Scans
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2018) Comino Trinidad, Marc; Andujar, Carlos; Chica, Antonio; Brunet, Pere; Ju, Tao and Vaxman, Amir
Normal vectors are essential for many point cloud operations, including segmentation, reconstruction and rendering. The robust estimation of normal vectors from 3D range scans is a challenging task due to undersampling and noise, specially when combining points sampled from multiple sensor locations. Our error model assumes a Gaussian distribution of the range error with spatially-varying variances that depend on sensor distance and reflected intensity, mimicking the features of Lidar equipment. In this paper we study the impact of measurement errors on the covariance matrices of point neighborhoods. We show that covariance matrices of the true surface points can be estimated from those of the acquired points plus sensordependent directional terms. We derive a lower bound on the neighbourhood size to guarantee that estimated matrix coefficients will be within a predefined error with a prescribed probability. This bound is key for achieving an optimal trade-off between smoothness and fine detail preservation. We also propose and compare different strategies for handling neighborhoods with samples coming from multiple materials and sensors. We show analytically that our method provides better normal estimates than competing approaches in noise conditions similar to those found in Lidar equipment.
Interactive Analysis of Word Vector Embeddings
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2018) Heimerl, Florian; Gleicher, Michael; Jeffrey Heer and Heike Leitte and Timo Ropinski
Word vector embeddings are an emerging tool for natural language processing. They have proven beneficial for a wide variety of language processing tasks. Their utility stems from the ability to encode word relationships within the vector space. Applications range from components in natural language processing systems to tools for linguistic analysis in the study of language and literature. In many of these applications, interpreting embeddings and understanding the encoded grammatical and semantic relations between words is useful, but challenging. Visualization can aid in such interpretation of embeddings. In this paper, we examine the role for visualization in working with word vector embeddings. We provide a literature survey to catalogue the range of tasks where the embeddings are employed across a broad range of applications. Based on this survey, we identify key tasks and their characteristics. Then, we present visual interactive designs that address many of these tasks. The designs integrate into an exploration and analysis environment for embeddings. Finally, we provide example use cases for them and discuss domain user feedback.
A Survey of Surface‐Based Illustrative Rendering for Visualization
(© 2018 The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2018) Lawonn, Kai; Viola, Ivan; Preim, Bernhard; Isenberg, Tobias; Chen, Min and Benes, Bedrich
In this paper, we survey illustrative rendering techniques for 3D surface models. We first discuss the field of illustrative visualization in general and provide a new definition for this sub‐area of visualization. For the remainder of the survey, we then focus on surface‐based models. We start by briefly summarizing the differential geometry fundamental to many approaches and discuss additional general requirements for the underlying models and the methods' implementations. We then provide an overview of low‐level illustrative rendering techniques including sparse lines, stippling and hatching, and illustrative shading, connecting each of them to practical examples of visualization applications. We also mention evaluation approaches and list various application fields, before we close with a discussion of the state of the art and future work.In this paper, we survey illustrative rendering techniques for 3D surface models. We first discuss the field of illustrative visualization in general and provide a new definition for this sub‐area of visualization. For the remainder of the survey, we then focus on surface‐based models. We start by briefly summarizing the differential geometry fundamental to many approaches and discuss additional general requirements for the underlying models and the methods' implementations. We then provide an overview of low‐level illustrative rendering techniques including sparse lines, stippling and hatching, and illustrative shading, connecting each of them to practical examples of visualization applications. We also mention evaluation approaches and list various application fields, before we close with a discussion of the state of the art and future work.
Exploring the Visualization Design Space with Repertory Grids
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2018) Kurzhals, Kuno; Weiskopf, Daniel; Jeffrey Heer and Heike Leitte and Timo Ropinski
There is an ongoing discussion in the visualization community about the relevant factors that render a visualization effective, expressive, memorable, aesthetically pleasing, etc. These factors lead to a large design space for visualizations. To explore this design space, qualitative research methods based on observations and interviews are often necessary. We describe an interview method that allows us to systematically acquire and assess important factors from subjective answers by interviewees. To this end, we adopt the repertory grid methodology in the context of visualization. It is based on the personal construct theory: each personality interprets a topic based on a set of personal, basic constructs expressed as contrasts. For the individual interpretation of visualizations, this means that these personal terms can be very different, depending on numerous influences, such as the prior experiences of the interviewed person. We present an interviewing process, visual interface, and qualitative and quantitative analysis procedures that are specifically devised to fit the needs of visualization applications. A showcase interview with 15 typical static information visualizations and 10 participants demonstrates that our approach is effective in identifying common constructs as well as individual differences. In particular, we investigate differences between expert and nonexpert interviewees. Finally, we discuss the differences to other qualitative methods and how the repertory grid can be embedded in existing theoretical frameworks of visualization research for the design process.
MPM Simulation of Interacting Fluids and Solids
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2018) Yan, Xiao; Li, Chen-Feng; Chen, Xiao-Song; Hu, Shi-Min; Thuerey, Nils and Beeler, Thabo
The material point method (MPM) has attracted increasing attention from the graphics community, as it combines the strengths of both particle- and grid-based solvers. Like the smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) scheme, MPM uses particles to discretize the simulation domain and represent the fundamental unknowns. This makes it insensitive to geometric and topological changes, and readily parallelizable on a GPU. Like grid-based solvers, MPM uses a background mesh for calculating spatial derivatives, providing more accurate and more stable results than a purely particle-based scheme. MPM has been very successful in simulating both fluid flow and solid deformation, but less so in dealing with multiple fluids and solids, where the dynamic fluid-solid interaction poses a major challenge. To address this shortcoming of MPM, we propose a new set of mathematical and computational schemes which enable efficient and robust fluid-solid interaction within the MPM framework. These versatile schemes support simulation of both multiphase flow and fully-coupled solid-fluid systems. A series of examples is presented to demonstrate their capabilities and performance in the presence of various interacting fluids and solids, including multiphase flow, fluid-solid interaction, and dissolution.
PointProNets: Consolidation of Point Clouds with Convolutional Neural Networks
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2018) Roveri, Riccardo; Öztireli, A. Cengiz; Pandele, Ioana; Gross, Markus; Gutierrez, Diego and Sheffer, Alla
With the widespread use of 3D acquisition devices, there is an increasing need of consolidating captured noisy and sparse point cloud data for accurate representation of the underlying structures. There are numerous algorithms that rely on a variety of assumptions such as local smoothness to tackle this ill-posed problem. However, such priors lead to loss of important features and geometric detail. Instead, we propose a novel data-driven approach for point cloud consolidation via a convolutional neural network based technique. Our method takes a sparse and noisy point cloud as input, and produces a dense point cloud accurately representing the underlying surface by resolving ambiguities in geometry. The resulting point set can then be used to reconstruct accurate manifold surfaces and estimate surface properties. To achieve this, we propose a generative neural network architecture that can input and output point clouds, unlocking a powerful set of tools from the deep learning literature. We use this architecture to apply convolutional neural networks to local patches of geometry for high quality and efficient point cloud consolidation. This results in significantly more accurate surfaces, as we illustrate with a diversity of examples and comparisons to the state-of-the-art.
Self-similarity Analysis for Motion Capture Cleaning
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2018) Aristidou, Andreas; Cohen-Or, Daniel; Hodgins, Jessica K.; Shamir, Ariel; Gutierrez, Diego and Sheffer, Alla
Motion capture sequences may contain erroneous data, especially when the motion is complex or performers are interacting closely and occlusions are frequent. Common practice is to have specialists visually detect the abnormalities and fix them manually. In this paper, we present a method to automatically analyze and fix motion capture sequences by using self-similarity analysis. The premise of this work is that human motion data has a high-degree of self-similarity. Therefore, given enough motion data, erroneous motions are distinct when compared to other motions. We utilize motion-words that consist of short sequences of transformations of groups of joints around a given motion frame. We search for the K-nearest neighbors (KNN) set of each word using dynamic time warping and use it to detect and fix erroneous motions automatically. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in various examples, and evaluate by comparing to alternative methods and to manual cleaning.
Strain Rate Dissipation for Elastic Deformations
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2018) Sánchez-Banderas, Rosa M.; Otaduy, Miguel A.; Thuerey, Nils and Beeler, Thabo
Damping determines how the energy in dynamic deformations is dissipated. The design of damping requires models where the behavior along deformation modes is easily controlled, while other motions are left unaffected. In this paper, we propose a framework for the design of damping using dissipation potentials formulated as functions of strain rate. We study simple parameterizations of the models, the application to continuum and discrete deformation models, and practical implications for implementation. We also study previous simple damping models, in particular we demonstrate limitations of Rayleigh damping. We analyze in detail the application of strain rate dissipation potentials to two highly different deformation models, StVK hyperlasticity and yarn-level cloth with sliding persistent contacts. These deformation models are representative of the range of applicability of the damping model.
PencilArt: A Chromatic Penciling Style Generation Framework
(© 2018 The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2018) Gao, Chengying; Tang, Mengyue; Liang, Xiangguo; Su, Zhuo; Zou, Changqing; Chen, Min and Benes, Bedrich
Non‐photorealistic rendering has been an active area of research for decades whereas few of them concentrate on rendering chromatic penciling style. In this paper, we present a framework named as PencilArt for the chromatic penciling style generation from wild photographs. The structural outline and textured map for composing the chromatic pencil drawing are generated, respectively. First, we take advantage of deep neural network to produce the structural outline with proper intensity variation and conciseness. Next, for the textured map, we follow the painting process of artists to adjust the tone of input images to match the luminance histogram and pencil textures of real drawings. Eventually, we evaluate PencilArt via a series of comparisons to previous work, showing that our results better capture the main features of real chromatic pencil drawings and have an improved visual appearance.Non‐photorealistic rendering has been an active area of research for decades whereas few of them concentrate on rendering chromatic penciling style. In this paper, we present a framework named as PencilArt for the chromatic penciling style generation from wild photographs. The structural outline and textured map for composing the chromatic pencil drawing are generated, respectively. First, we take advantage of deep neural network to produce the structural outline with proper intensity variation and conciseness. Next, for the textured map, we follow the painting process of artists to adjust the tone of input images to match the luminance histogram and pencil textures of real drawings. Eventually, we evaluate PencilArt via a series of comparisons to previous work, showing that our results better capture the main features of real chromatic pencil drawings and have an improved visual appearance.
PCPNet: Learning Local Shape Properties from Raw Point Clouds
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2018) Guerrero, Paul; Kleiman, Yanir; Ovsjanikov, Maks; Mitra, Niloy J.; Gutierrez, Diego and Sheffer, Alla
In this paper, we propose PCPNET, a deep-learning based approach for estimating local 3D shape properties in point clouds. In contrast to the majority of prior techniques that concentrate on global or mid-level attributes, e.g., for shape classification or semantic labeling, we suggest a patch-based learning method, in which a series of local patches at multiple scales around each point is encoded in a structured manner. Our approach is especially well-adapted for estimating local shape properties such as normals (both unoriented and oriented) and curvature from raw point clouds in the presence of strong noise and multi-scale features. Our main contributions include both a novel multi-scale variant of the recently proposed PointNet architecture with emphasis on local shape information, and a series of novel applications in which we demonstrate how learning from training data arising from well-structured triangle meshes, and applying the trained model to noisy point clouds can produce superior results compared to specialized state-of-the-art techniques. Finally, we demonstrate the utility of our approach in the context of shape reconstruction, by showing how it can be used to extract normal orientation information from point clouds.
Vector Field Map Representation for Near Conformal Surface Correspondence
(© 2018 The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2018) Wang, Y.; Liu, B.; Zhou, K.; Tong, Y.; Chen, Min and Benes, Bedrich
Based on a new spectral vector field analysis on triangle meshes, we construct a compact representation for near conformal mesh surface correspondences. Generalizing the functional map representation, our representation uses the map between the low‐frequency tangent vector fields induced by the correspondence. While our representation is as efficient, it is also capable of handling a more generic class of correspondence inference. We also formulate the vector field preservation constraints and regularization terms for correspondence inference, with function preservation treated as a special case. A number of important vector field–related constraints can be implicitly enforced in our representation, including the commutativity of the mapping with the usual gradient, curl, divergence operators or angle preservation under near conformal correspondence. For function transfer between shapes, the preservation of function values on landmarks can be strictly enforced through our gradient domain representation, enabling transfer across different topologies. With the vector field map representation, a novel class of constraints can be specified for the alignment of designed or computed vector field pairs. We demonstrate the advantages of the vector field map representation in tests on conformal datasets and near‐isometric datasets.Based on a new spectral vector field analysis on triangle meshes, we construct a compact representation for near conformal mesh surface correspondences. Generalizing the functional map representation, our representation uses the map between the low‐frequency tangent vector fields induced by the correspondence. While our representation is as efficient, it is also capable of handling a more generic class of correspondence inference. We also formulate the vector field preservation constraints and regularization terms for correspondence inference, with function preservation treated as a special case. A number of important vector field–related constraints can be implicitly enforced in our representation, including the commutativity of the mapping with the usual gradient, curl, divergence operators or angle preservation under near conformal correspondence.
An Approximate Parallel Vectors Operator for Multiple Vector Fields
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2018) Gerrits, Tim; Rössl, Christian; Theisel, Holger; Jeffrey Heer and Heike Leitte and Timo Ropinski
The Parallel Vectors (PV) Operator extracts the locations of points where two vector fields are parallel. In general, these features are line structures. The PV operator has been used successfully for a variety of problems, which include finding vortex-core lines or extremum lines. We present a new generic feature extraction method for multiple 3D vector fields: The Approximate Parallel Vectors (APV) Operator extracts lines where all fields are approximately parallel. The definition of the APV operator is based on the application of PV for two vector fields that are derived from the given set of fields. The APV operator enables the direct visualization of features of vector field ensembles without processing fields individually and without causing visual clutter. We give a theoretical analysis of the APV operator and demonstrate its utility for a number of ensemble data.
Coupled Fluid Density and Motion from Single Views
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2018) Eckert, Marie-Lena; Heidrich, Wolfgang; Thuerey, Nils; Thuerey, Nils and Beeler, Thabo
We present a novel method to reconstruct a fluid's 3D density and motion based on just a single sequence of images. This is rendered possible by using powerful physical priors for this strongly under-determined problem. More specifically, we propose a novel strategy to infer density updates strongly coupled to previous and current estimates of the flow motion. Additionally, we employ an accurate discretization and depth-based regularizers to compute stable solutions. Using only one view for the reconstruction reduces the complexity of the capturing setup drastically and could even allow for online video databases or smart-phone videos as inputs. The reconstructed 3D velocity can then be flexibly utilized, e.g., for re-simulation, domain modification or guiding purposes. We will demonstrate the capacity of our method with a series of synthetic test cases and the reconstruction of real smoke plumes captured with a Raspberry Pi camera.
Baseball Timeline: Summarizing Baseball Plays Into a Static Visualization
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2018) Ono, Jorge H. Piazentin; Dietrich, Carlos; Silva, Claudio T.; Jeffrey Heer and Heike Leitte and Timo Ropinski
In sports, Play Diagrams are the standard way to represent and convey information. They are widely used by coaches, managers, journalists and fans in general. There are situations where diagrams may be hard to understand, for example, when several actions are packed in a certain region of the field or there are just too many actions to be transformed in a clear depiction of the play. The representation of how actions develop through time, in particular, may be hardly achieved on such diagrams. The time, and the relationship among the actions of the players through time, is critical on the depiction of complex plays. In this context, we present a study on how player actions may be clearly depicted on 2D diagrams. The study is focused on Baseball plays, a sport where diagrams are heavily used to summarize the actions of the players. We propose a new and simple approach to represent spatiotemporal information in the form of a timeline. We designed our visualization with a requirement driven approach, conducting interviews and fulfilling the needs of baseball experts and expert-fans. We validate our approach by presenting a detailed analysis of baseball plays and conducting interviews with four domain experts.

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