33-Issue 2

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https://diglib.eg.org/handle/10.2312/11784

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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.
Designing Large-Scale Interactive Traffic Animations for Urban Modeling
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2014) Garcia-Dorado, Ignacio; Aliaga, Daniel G.; Ukkusuri, Satish V.; B. Levy and J. Kautz
Designing and optimizing traffic behavior and animation is a challenging problem of interest to virtual environment content generation and to urban planning and design. While some traffic simulation methods have appeared in computer graphics, most related systems focus on the design of buildings, roads, or cities but without explicitly considering urban traffic. To our knowledge, our work provides the first interactive approach which enables a designer to specify a desired vehicular traffic behavior (e.g., road occupancy, travel time, emissions, etc.) and the system will automatically compute what realistic 3D urban model (e.g., an interconnected network of roads, parcels, and buildings) yields the specified behavior. Our system both altered and improved traffic behavior in novel procedurally-generated cities and in road networks of existing cities. Our urban models contain up to 360 km of roads, 300,000 vehicles, and typically cover four hours of simulated peak traffic time. The typical editing session time to "paint" a new traffic pattern and to compute the new/changed urban model is two to five minutes.
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.
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.
Optimizing BRDF Orientations for the Manipulation of Anisotropic Highlights
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2014) Raymond, Boris; Guennebaud, Gaël; Barla, Pascal; Pacanowski, Romain; Granier, Xavier; B. Levy and J. Kautz
This paper introduces a system for the direct editing of highlights produced by anisotropic BRDFs, which we call anisotropic highlights. We first provide a comprehensive analysis of the link between the direction of anisotropy and the shape of highlight curves for arbitrary object surfaces. The gained insights provide the required ingredients to infer BRDF orientations from a prescribed highlight tangent field. This amounts to a non-linear optimization problem, which is solved at interactive framerates during manipulation. Taking inspiration from sculpting software, we provide tools that give the impression of manipulating highlight curves while actually modifying their tangents. Our solver produces desired highlight shapes for a host of lighting environments and anisotropic BRDFs.
Compressing Dynamic Meshes with Geometric Laplacians
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2014) Vasa, Libor; Marras, Stefano; Hormann, Kai; Brunnett, Guido; B. Levy and J. Kautz
This paper addresses the problem of representing dynamic 3D meshes in a compact way, so that they can be stored and transmitted efficiently. We focus on sequences of triangle meshes with shared connectivity, avoiding the necessity of having a skinning structure. Our method first computes an average mesh of the whole sequence in edge shape space. A discrete geometric Laplacian of this average surface is then used to encode the coefficients that describe the trajectories of the mesh vertices. Optionally, a novel spatio-temporal predictor may be applied to the trajectories to further improve the compression rate. We demonstrate that our approach outperforms the current state of the art in terms of low data rate at a given perceived distortion, as measured by the STED and KG error metrics.
A Randomized Algorithm for Natural Object Colorization
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2014) Jin, Sou-Young; Choi, Ho Jin; Tai, Yu-Wing; B. Levy and J. Kautz
Natural objects often contain vivid color distribution with wide variety of colors. Conventional colorization techniques, on the other hand, produce colors that are relatively flat with little color variation. In this paper, we introduce a randomized algorithm which considers not only the value of target color but also the distribution of target color. In essence, our algorithm paints a color distribution to a region which synthesizes color distribution of a natural object. Our approach models the correlation between intensity and color in HSV color space in terms of H - S, H - V and S - V joint histogram. During the colorization process, we randomly swap and reassign color of a pixel to minimize a cost function that measures color consistency to its neighborhood and intensity-to-color correlation captured in the joint histogram. We tested our algorithm extensively on many natural objects and our user study confirms that our results are more vivid and natural compared to results from previous techniques.
Analogy-Driven 3D Style Transfer
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2014) Ma, Chongyang; Huang, Haibin; Sheffer, Alla; Kalogerakis, Evangelos; Wang, Rui; B. Levy and J. Kautz
Style transfer aims to apply the style of an exemplar model to a target one, while retaining the target s structure. The main challenge in this process is to algorithmically distinguish style from structure, a high-level, potentially ill-posed cognitive task. Inspired by cognitive science research we recast style transfer in terms of shape analogies. In IQ testing, shape analogy queries present the subject with three shapes: source, target and exemplar, and ask them to select an output such that the transformation, or analogy, from the exemplar to the output is similar to that from the source to the target. The logical process involved in identifying the source-to-target analogies implicitly detects the structural differences between the source and target and can be used effectively to facilitate style transfer. Since the exemplar has a similar structure to the source, applying the analogy to the exemplar will provide the output we seek. The main technical challenge we address is to compute the source to target analogies, consistent with human logic. We observe that the typical analogies we look for consist of a small set of simple transformations, which when applied to the exemplar generate a continuous, seamless output model. To assemble a shape analogy, we compute an optimal set of source-to-target transformations, such that the assembled analogy best fits these criteria. The assembled analogy is then applied to the exemplar shape to produce the desired output model. We use the proposed framework to seamlessly transfer a variety of style properties between 2D and 3D objects and demonstrate significant improvements over the state of the art in style transfer. We further show that our framework can be used to successfully complete partial scans with the help of a user provided structural template, coherently propagating scan style across the completed surfaces.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Rate-distortion Optimized Compression of Motion Capture Data
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2014) Vasa, Libor; Brunnett, Guido; B. Levy and J. Kautz
Lossy compression of motion capture data can alleviate the problems of efficient storage and transmission by exploiting the redundancy and the superfluous precision of the data. When considering the acceptable amount of distortion, perceptual issues have to be taken into account. Current state of the art methods reduce the data rate required for high quality storage of motion capture data using various techniques. Most of them, however, do not use the common tools of general data compression, such as the method of Lagrange multipliers, and thus they obtain sub-optimal results, making it difficult to do a fair comparison of their performance. In this paper, we present a general preprocessing step based on Lagrange multipliers, which allows to rigorously adjust the precision in each of the degrees of freedom of the input data according to the amount of influence the given degree of freedom has on the overall distortion. We then present a simple compression method based on Principal Component Analysis, which in combination with the proposed preprocessing achieves significantly better results than current state of the art methods. It allows optimization with respect to various distortion metrics, and we discuss the choice of the metric in two common but distinct scenarios, proposing a perceptually oriented comparison metric based on the relation of the problem at hand to the problem of compression of dynamic meshes.
Temporally Coherent and Spatially Accurate Video Matting
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2014) Shahrian, Ehsan; Price, Brian; Cohen, Scott; Rajan, Deepu; B. Levy and J. Kautz
Image and video matting are still challenging problems in areas with low foreground-background contrast. Video matting also has the challenge of ensuring temporally coherent mattes because the human visual system is highly sensitive to temporal jitter and flickering. On the other hand, video provides the opportunity to use information from other frames to improve the matte accuracy on a given frame. In this paper, we present a new video matting approach that improves the temporal coherence while maintaining high spatial accuracy in the computed mattes. We build sample sets of temporal and local samples that cover all the color distributions of the object and background over all previous frames. This helps guarantee spatial accuracy and temporal coherence by ensuring that proper samples are found even when distantly located in space or time. An explicit energy term encourages temporal consistency in the mattes derived from the selected samples. In addition, we use localized texture features to improve spatial accuracy in low contrast regions where color distributions overlap. The proposed method results in better spatial accuracy and temporal coherence than existing video matting methods.
Content-Aware Surface Parameterization for Interactive Restoration of Historical Documents
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2014) Pal, Kazim; Schüller, Christian; Panozzo, Daniele; Sorkine-Hornung, Olga; Weyrich, Tim; B. Levy and J. Kautz
We present an interactive method to restore severely damaged historical parchments. When damaged by heat in a fire, such manuscripts undergo a complex deformation and contain various geometric distortions such as wrinkling, buckling, and shrinking, rendering them nearly illegible. They cannot be physically flattened due to the risk of further damage. We propose a virtual restoration framework to estimate the non-rigid deformation the parchment underwent and to revert it, making reading the text significantly easier whilst maintaining the veracity of the textual content. We estimate the deformation by combining automatically extracted constraints with user-provided hints informed by domain knowledge. We demonstrate that our method successfully flattens and straightens the text on a variety of pages scanned from a 17th century document which fell victim to fire damage.

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