EG 2016 - Full Papers - CGF 35-Issue 2

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https://diglib.eg.org/handle/10.2312/15064

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Buoyancy Optimization for Computational Fabrication
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Wang, Lingfeng; Whiting, Emily; Joaquim Jorge and Ming Lin
This paper introduces a design and fabrication pipeline for creating floating forms. Our method optimizes for buoyant equilibrium and stability of complex 3D shapes, applying a voxel-carving technique to control the mass distribution. The resulting objects achieve a desired floating pose defined by a user-specified waterline height and orientation. In order to enlarge the feasible design space, we explore novel ways to load the interior of a design using prefabricated components and casting techniques. 3D printing is employed for high-precision fabrication. For larger scale designs we introduce a method for stacking lasercut planar pieces to create 3D objects in a quick and economic manner. We demonstrate fabricated designs of complex shape in a variety of floating poses.
A Practical and Controllable Hair and Fur Model for Production Path Tracing
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Chiang, Matt Jen-Yuan; Bitterli, Benedikt; Tappan, Chuck; Burley, Brent; Joaquim Jorge and Ming Lin
We present an energy-conserving fiber shading model for hair and fur that is efficient enough for path tracing. Our model adopts a near-field formulation to avoid the expensive integral across the fiber, accounts for all high order internal reflection events with a single lobe, and proposes a novel, closed-form distribution for azimuthal roughness based on the logistic distribution. Additionally, we derive, through simulation, a parameterization that relates intuitive user controls such as multiple-scattering albedo and isotropic cylinder roughness to the underlying physical parameters.
Inertial Steady 2D Vector Field Topology
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Günther, Tobias; Theisel, Holger; Joaquim Jorge and Ming Lin
Vector field topology is a powerful and matured tool for the study of the asymptotic behavior of tracer particles in steady flows. Yet, it does not capture the behavior of finite-sized particles, because they develop inertia and do not move tangential to the flow. In this paper, we use the fact that the trajectories of inertial particles can be described as tangent curves of a higher dimensional vector field. Using this, we conduct a full classification of the first-order critical points of this higher dimensional flow, and devise a method to their efficient extraction. Further, we interactively visualize the asymptotic behavior of finite-sized particles by a glyph visualization that encodes the outcome of any initial condition of the governing ODE, i.e., for a varying initial position and/or initial velocity. With this, we present a first approach to extend traditional vector field topology to the inertial case.
VBTC: GPU-Friendly Variable Block Size Texture Encoding
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Krajcevski, Pavel; Golas, Abhinav; Ramani, Karthik; Shebanow, Michael; Manocha, Dinesh; Joaquim Jorge and Ming Lin
Recent advances in computer graphics have relied on high-quality textures in order to generate photorealistic real-time images. Texture compression standards meet these growing demands for data, but current texture compression schemes use fixed-rate methods where statically sized blocks of pixels are represented using the same numbers of bits irrespective of their data content. In order to account for the natural variation in detail, we present an alternative format that allows variable bit-rate texture compression with minimal changes to texturing hardware. Our proposed scheme uses one additional level of indirection to allow the variation of the block size across the same texture. This single change is exploited to both vary the amount of bits allocated to certain parts of the texture and to duplicate redundant texture information across multiple pixels. To minimize hardware changes, the method picks combinations of block sizes and compression methods from existing fixed-rate standards. With this approach, our method is able to demonstrate energy savings of up to 50%, as well as higher quality compressed textures over current state of the art techniques.
DeepProp: Extracting Deep Features from a Single Image for Edit Propagation
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Endo, Yuki; Iizuka, Satoshi; Kanamori, Yoshihiro; Mitani, Jun; Joaquim Jorge and Ming Lin
Edit propagation is a technique that can propagate various image edits (e.g., colorization and recoloring) performed via user strokes to the entire image based on similarity of image features. In most previous work, users must manually determine the importance of each image feature (e.g., color, coordinates, and textures) in accordance with their needs and target images. We focus on representation learning that automatically learns feature representations only from user strokes in a single image instead of tuning existing features manually. To this end, this paper proposes an edit propagation method using a deep neural network (DNN). Our DNN, which consists of several layers such as convolutional layers and a feature combiner, extracts strokeadapted visual features and spatial features, and then adjusts the importance of them. We also develop a learning algorithm for our DNN that does not suffer from the vanishing gradient problem, and hence avoids falling into undesirable locally optimal solutions. We demonstrate that edit propagation with deep features, without manual feature tuning, can achieve better results than previous work.
Building Construction Sets by Tiling Grammar Simplification
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Kalojanov, Javor; Wand, Michael; Slusallek, Philipp; Joaquim Jorge and Ming Lin
This paper poses the problem of fabricating physical construction sets from example geometry: A construction set provides a small number of different types of building blocks from which the example model as well as many similar variants can be reassembled. This process is formalized by tiling grammars. Our core contribution is an approach for simplifying tiling grammars such that we obtain physically manufacturable building blocks of controllable granularity while retaining variability, i.e., the ability to construct many different, related shapes. Simplification is performed by sequences of two types of elementary operations: non-local joint edge collapses in the tile graphs reduce the granularity of the decomposition and approximate replacement operations reduce redundancy. We evaluate our method on abstract graph grammars in addition to computing several physical construction sets, which are manufactured using a commodity 3D printer.
Generalized Diffusion Curves: An Improved Vector Representation for Smooth-Shaded Images
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Jeschke, Stefan; Joaquim Jorge and Ming Lin
This paper generalizes the well-known Diffusion Curves Images (DCI), which are composed of a set of Bezier curves with colors specified on either side. These colors are diffused as Laplace functions over the image domain, which results in smooth color gradients interrupted by the Bezier curves. Our new formulation allows for more color control away from the boundary, providing a similar expressive power as recent Bilaplace image models without introducing associated issues and computational costs. The new model is based on a special Laplace function blending and a new edge blur formulation. We demonstrate that given some user-defined boundary curves over an input raster image, fitting colors and edge blur from the image to the new model and subsequent editing and animation is equally convenient as with DCIs. Numerous examples and comparisons to DCIs are presented.
Automatic Portrait Segmentation for Image Stylization
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Shen, Xiaoyong; Hertzmann, Aaron; Jia, Jiaya; Paris, Sylvain; Price, Brian; Shechtman, Eli; Sachs, Ian; Joaquim Jorge and Ming Lin
Portraiture is a major art form in both photography and painting. In most instances, artists seek to make the subject stand out from its surrounding, for instance, by making it brighter or sharper. In the digital world, similar effects can be achieved by processing a portrait image with photographic or painterly filters that adapt to the semantics of the image. While many successful user-guided methods exist to delineate the subject, fully automatic techniques are lacking and yield unsatisfactory results. Our paper first addresses this problem by introducing a new automatic segmentation algorithm dedicated to portraits. We then build upon this result and describe several portrait filters that exploit our automatic segmentation algorithm to generate high-quality portraits.
Geometry and Attribute Compression for Voxel Scenes
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Dado, Bas; Kol, Timothy R.; Bauszat, Pablo; Thiery, Jean-Marc; Eisemann, Elmar; Joaquim Jorge and Ming Lin
Voxel-based approaches are today's standard to encode volume data. Recently, directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) were successfully used for compressing sparse voxel scenes as well, but they are restricted to a single bit of (geometry) information per voxel. We present a method to compress arbitrary data, such as colors, normals, or reflectance information. By decoupling geometry and voxel data via a novel mapping scheme, we are able to apply the DAG principle to encode the topology, while using a palette-based compression for the voxel attributes, leading to a drastic memory reduction. Our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art techniques and is well-suited for GPU architectures. We achieve real-time performance on commodity hardware for colored scenes with up to 17 hierarchical levels (a 128K3 voxel resolution), which are stored fully in core.
Fast and Robust Inversion-Free Shape Manipulation
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Liu, Tiantian; Gao, Ming; Zhu, Lifeng; Sifakis, Eftychios; Kavan, Ladislav; Joaquim Jorge and Ming Lin
We present a shape manipulation technique capable of producing deformations of 2D and 3D meshes, guaranteeing that no elements will be inverted. We achieve this by augmenting the quadratic ex-rotated elastic energy with additional convex terms that penalize the presence of inverted elements. Using a schedule of increasing penalty coefficients, we efficiently and robustly converge to an inversion free state by solving a sequence of unconstrained convex minimization problems. This process can be interpreted as a special purpose Semi-Definite Programming (SDP) solver. We demonstrate that our method outperforms solvers used in previous work, including commercial-grade SDP software (MOSEK). As an additional benefit, our method also converges to the solution via a more intuitive path, which can be used for quick preview. We demonstrate the efficacy of our scheme in a number of 2D and 3D shapes undergoing moderate to drastic deformation.
Smooth Image Sequences for Data-driven Morphing
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Averbuch-Elor, Hadar; Cohen-Or, Daniel; Kopf, Johannes; Joaquim Jorge and Ming Lin
Smoothness is a quality that feels aesthetic and pleasing to the human eye. We present an algorithm for finding ''as-smoothas- possible'' sequences in image collections. In contrast to previous work, our method does not assume that the images show a common 3D scene, but instead may depict different object instances with varying deformations, and significant variation in lighting, texture, and color appearance. Our algorithm does not rely on a notion of camera pose, view direction, or 3D representation of an underlying scene, but instead directly optimizes the smoothness of the apparent motion of local point matches among the collection images. We increase the smoothness of our sequences by performing a global similarity transform alignment, as well as localized geometric wobble reduction and appearance stabilization. Our technique gives rise to a new kind of image morphing algorithm, in which the in-between motion is derived in a data-driven manner from a smooth sequence of real images without any user intervention. This new type of morph can go far beyond the ability of traditional techniques. We also demonstrate that our smooth sequences allow exploring large image collections in a stable manner.
Improved Surface Quality in 3D Printing by Optimizing the Printing Direction
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Wang, Weiming; Zanni, Cédric; Kobbelt, Leif; Joaquim Jorge and Ming Lin
We present a pipeline of algorithms that decomposes a given polygon model into parts such that each part can be 3D printed with high (outer) surface quality. For this we exploit the fact that most 3D printing technologies have an anisotropic resolution and hence the surface smoothness varies significantly with the orientation of the surface. Our pipeline starts by segmenting the input surface into patches such that their normals can be aligned perpendicularly to the printing direction. A 3D Voronoi diagram is computed such that the intersections of the Voronoi cells with the surface approximate these surface patches. The intersections of the Voronoi cells with the input model's volume then provide an initial decomposition. We further present an algorithm to compute an assembly order for the parts and generate connectors between them. A post processing step further optimizes the seams between segments to improve the visual quality. We run our pipeline on a wide range of 3D models and experimentally evaluate the obtained improvements in terms of numerical, visual, and haptic quality.
Large Scale Terrain Generation from Tectonic Uplift and Fluvial Erosion
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Cordonnier, Guillaume; Braun, Jean; Cani, Marie-Paule; Benes, Bedrich; Galin, Éric; Peytavie, Adrien; Guérin, Éric; Joaquim Jorge and Ming Lin
At large scale, landscapes result from the combination of two major processes: tectonics which generate the main relief through crust uplift, and weather which accounts for erosion. This paper presents the first method in computer graphics that combines uplift and hydraulic erosion to generate visually plausible terrains. Given a user-painted uplift map, we generate a stream graph over the entire domain embedding elevation information and stream flow. Our approach relies on the stream power equation introduced in geology for hydraulic erosion. By combining crust uplift and stream power erosion we generate large realistic terrains at a low computational cost. Finally, we convert this graph into a digital elevation model by blending landform feature kernels whose parameters are derived from the information in the graph. Our method gives high-level control over the large scale dendritic structures of the resulting river networks, watersheds, and mountains ridges.
Regularizing Image Reconstruction for Gradient-Domain Rendering with Feature Patches
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Manzi, Marco; Vicini, Delio; Zwicker, Matthias; Joaquim Jorge and Ming Lin
We present a novel algorithm to reconstruct high-quality images from sampled pixels and gradients in gradient-domain rendering. Our approach extends screened Poisson reconstruction by adding additional regularization constraints. Our key idea is to exploit local patches in feature images, which contain per-pixels normals, textures, position, etc., to formulate these constraints. We describe a GPU implementation of our approach that runs on the order of seconds on megapixel images. We demonstrate a significant improvement in image quality over screened Poisson reconstruction under the L1 norm. Because we adapt the regularization constraints to the noise level in the input, our algorithm is consistent and converges to the ground truth.
Near-Instant Capture of High-Resolution Facial Geometry and Reflectance
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Fyffe, Graham; Graham, Paul; Tunwattanapong, Borom; Ghosh, Abhijeet; Debevec, Paul; Joaquim Jorge and Ming Lin
We present a near-instant method for acquiring facial geometry and reflectance using a set of commodity DSLR cameras and flashes. Our setup consists of twenty-four cameras and six flashes which are fired in rapid succession with subsets of the cameras. Each camera records only a single photograph and the total capture time is less than the 67ms blink reflex. The cameras and flashes are specially arranged to produce an even distribution of specular highlights on the face. We employ this set of acquired images to estimate diffuse color, specular intensity, specular exponent, and surface orientation at each point on the face. We further refine the facial base geometry obtained from multi-view stereo using estimated diffuse and specular photometric information. This allows final submillimeter surface mesostructure detail to be obtained via shape-from-specularity. The final system uses commodity components and produces models suitable for authoring high-quality digital human characters.
Animation Setup Transfer for 3D Characters
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Avril, Quentin; Ghafourzadeh, Donya; Ramachandran, Srinivasan; Fallahdoust, Sahel; Ribet, Sarah; Dionne, Olivier; Lasa, Martin de; Paquette, Eric; Joaquim Jorge and Ming Lin
We present a general method for transferring skeletons and skinning weights between characters with distinct mesh topologies. Our pipeline takes as inputs a source character rig (consisting of a mesh, a transformation hierarchy of joints, and skinning weights) and a target character mesh. From these inputs, we compute joint locations and orientations that embed the source skeleton in the target mesh, as well as skinning weights to bind the target geometry to the new skeleton. Our method consists of two key steps. We first compute the geometric correspondence between source and target meshes using a semi-automatic method relying on a set of markers. The resulting geometric correspondence is then used to formulate attribute transfer as an energy minimization and filtering problem. We demonstrate our approach on a variety of source and target bipedal characters, varying in mesh topology and morphology. Several examples demonstrate that the target characters behave well when animated with either forward or inverse kinematics. Via these examples, we show that our method preserves subtle artistic variations; spatial relationships between geometry and joints, as well as skinning weight details, are accurately maintained. Our proposed pipeline opens up many exciting possibilities to quickly animate novel characters by reusing existing production assets.
Geometric Flows of Curves in Shape Space for Processing Motion of Deformable Objects
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Brandt, Christopher; Tycowicz, Christoph von; Hildebrandt, Klaus; Joaquim Jorge and Ming Lin
We introduce techniques for the processing of motion and animations of non-rigid shapes. The idea is to regard animations of deformable objects as curves in shape space. Then, we use the geometric structure on shape space to transfer concepts from curve processing in Rn to the processing of motion of non-rigid shapes. Following this principle, we introduce a discrete geometric flow for curves in shape space. The flow iteratively replaces every shape with a weighted average shape of a local neighborhood and thereby globally decreases an energy whose minimizers are discrete geodesics in shape space. Based on the flow, we devise a novel smoothing filter for motions and animations of deformable shapes. By shortening the length in shape space of an animation, it systematically regularizes the deformations between consecutive frames of the animation. The scheme can be used for smoothing and noise removal, e.g., for reducing jittering artifacts in motion capture data. We introduce a reduced-order method for the computation of the flow. In addition to being efficient for the smoothing of curves, it is a novel scheme for computing geodesics in shape space. We use the scheme to construct non-linear ''Bézier curves'' by executing de Casteljau's algorithm in shape space.
Seamless Video Stitching from Hand-held Camera Inputs
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Lin, Kaimo; Liu, Shuaicheng; Cheong, Loong-Fah; Zeng, Bing; Joaquim Jorge and Ming Lin
Images/videos captured by portable devices (e.g., cellphones, DV cameras) often have limited fields of view. Image stitching, also referred to as mosaics or panorama, can produce a wide angle image by compositing several photographs together. Although various methods have been developed for image stitching in recent years, few works address the video stitching problem. In this paper, we present the first system to stitch videos captured by hand-held cameras. We first recover the 3D camera paths and a sparse set of 3D scene points using CoSLAM system, and densely reconstruct the 3D scene in the overlapping regions. Then, we generate a smooth virtual camera path, which stays in the middle of the original paths. Finally, the stitched video is synthesized along the virtual path as if it was taken from this new trajectory. The warping required for the stitching is obtained by optimizing over both temporal stability and alignment quality, while leveraging on 3D information at our disposal. The experiments show that our method can produce high quality stitching results for various challenging scenarios.
An Objective Deghosting Quality Metric for HDR Images
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Tursun, Okan Tarhan; Akyüz, Ahmet Oğuz; Erdem, Aykut; Erdem, Erkut; Joaquim Jorge and Ming Lin
Reconstructing high dynamic range (HDR) images of a complex scene involving moving objects and dynamic backgrounds is prone to artifacts. A large number of methods have been proposed that attempt to alleviate these artifacts, known as HDR deghosting algorithms. Currently, the quality of these algorithms are judged by subjective evaluations, which are tedious to conduct and get quickly outdated as new algorithms are proposed on a rapid basis. In this paper, we propose an objective metric which aims to simplify this process. Our metric takes a stack of input exposures and the deghosting result and produces a set of artifact maps for different types of artifacts. These artifact maps can be combined to yield a single quality score. We performed a subjective experiment involving 52 subjects and 16 different scenes to validate the agreement of our quality scores with subjective judgements and observed a concordance of almost 80%. Our metric also enables a novel application that we call as hybrid deghosting, in which the output of different deghosting algorithms are combined to obtain a superior deghosting result.
Effect of Low-level Visual Details in Perception of Deformation
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Han, Donghui; Keyser, John; Joaquim Jorge and Ming Lin
We quantitatively measure how different low-level visual details can influence people's perceived stiffness of a deformable sphere under physically based simulation. The result can be used to create a metric for artists in designing textures to enhance or reduce the stiffness perceived by a viewer. We use a checkerboard texture to render the simulation of a free falling sphere that collides with the ground and bounces up. We vary the spatial frequency and contrast of the checkerboard pattern according to results seen in a previous study on the Spatial- Temporal Contrast Sensitivity Function (CSF).We find that checkerboard pattern with certain combinations of spatial frequency and contrast can reduce the perceived stiffness. We also add a high contrast checkerboard background to study how complex backgrounds can influence the effect of low-level details in textures of foreground objects. Our study shows that the effect of low-level visual details in foreground objects observed previously disappears in this situation. This indicates the importance of background, even if it is static.

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