EG2014

Permanent URI for this community

https://diglib.eg.org/handle/10.2312/7703

Browse

Now showing 1 - 20 of 106

State of the Art Report on Real-time Rendering with Hardware Tessellation
(The Eurographics Association, 2014) Schäfer, H.; Nießner, M.; Keinert, B.; Stamminger, M.; Loop, C.; Sylvain Lefebvre and Michela Spagnuolo
For a long time, GPUs have primarily been optimized to render more and more triangles with increasingly flexible shading. However, scene data itself has typically been generated on the CPU and then uploaded to GPU memory. Therefore, widely used techniques that generate geometry at render time on demand for the rendering of smooth and displaced surfaces were not applicable to interactive applications. As a result of recent advances in graphics hardware, in particular the GPU tessellation unit's ability to overcome this limitation, complex geometry can now be generated within the GPU's rendering pipeline on the fly. GPU hardware tessellation enables the generation of smooth parametric surfaces or application of displacement mapping in real-time applications. However, many well-established approaches in offline rendering are not directly transferable, due to the limited tessellation patterns or the parallel execution model of the tessellation stage. In this state of the art report, we provide an overview of recent work and challenges in this topic by summarizing, discussing and comparing methods for the rendering of smooth and highly detailed surfaces in real-time.
ExploreMaps: Efficient Construction and Ubiquitous Exploration of Panoramic View Graphs of Complex 3D Environments
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2014) Benedetto, Marco Di; Ganovelli, Fabio; Rodriguez, Marcos Balsa; Villanueva, Alberto Jaspe; Scopigno, Roberto; Gobbetti, Enrico; B. Levy and J. Kautz
We introduce a novel efficient technique for automatically transforming a generic renderable 3D scene into a simple graph representation named ExploreMaps, where nodes are nicely placed point of views, called probes, and arcs are smooth paths between neighboring probes. Each probe is associated with a panoramic image enriched with preferred viewing orientations, and each path with a panoramic video. Our GPU-accelerated unattended construction pipeline distributes probes so as to guarantee coverage of the scene while accounting for perceptual criteria before finding smooth, good looking paths between neighboring probes. Images and videos are precomputed at construction time with off-line photorealistic rendering engines, providing a convincing 3D visualization beyond the limits of current real-time graphics techniques. At run-time, the graph is exploited both for creating automatic scene indexes and movie previews of complex scenes and for supporting interactive exploration through a low-DOF assisted navigation interface and the visual indexing of the scene provided by the selected viewpoints. Due to negligible CPU overhead and very limited use of GPU functionality, real-time performance is achieved on emerging web-based environments based on WebGL even on low-powered mobile devices.
Parallel Generation of Architecture on the GPU
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2014) Steinberger, Markus; Kenzel, Michael; Kainz, Bernhard; Müller, Jörg; Wonka, Peter; Schmalstieg, Dieter; B. Levy and J. Kautz
In this paper, we present a novel approach for the parallel evaluation of procedural shape grammars on the graphics processing unit (GPU). Unlike previous approaches that are either limited in the kind of shapes they allow, the amount of parallelism they can take advantage of, or both, our method supports state of the art procedural modeling including stochasticity and context-sensitivity. To increase parallelism, we explicitly express independence in the grammar, reduce inter-rule dependencies required for context-sensitive evaluation, and introduce intra-rule parallelism. Our rule scheduling scheme avoids unnecessary back and forth between CPU and GPU and reduces round trips to slow global memory by dynamically grouping rules in on-chip shared memory. Our GPU shape grammar implementation is multiple orders of magnitude faster than the standard in CPU-based rule evaluation, while offering equal expressive power. In comparison to the state of the art in GPU shape grammar derivation, our approach is nearly 50 times faster, while adding support for geometric context-sensitivity.
Perceptual Depth Compression for Stereo Applications
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2014) Pajak, Dawid; Herzog, Robert; Mantiuk, Radoslaw; Didyk, Piotr; Eisemann, Elmar; Myszkowski, Karol; Pulli, Kari; B. Levy and J. Kautz
Conventional depth video compression uses video codecs designed for color images. Given the performance of current encoding standards, this solution seems efficient. However, such an approach suffers from many issues stemming from discrepancies between depth and light perception. To exploit the inherent limitations of human depth perception, we propose a novel depth compression method that employs a disparity perception model. In contrast to previous methods, we account for disparity masking, and model a distinct relation between depth perception and contrast in luminance. Our solution is a natural extension to the H.264 codec and can easily be integrated into existing decoders. It significantly improves both the compression efficiency without sacrificing visual quality of depth of rendered content, and the output of depth-reconstruction algorithms or depth cameras.
Student Project - Portable Real-Time 3D Engine
(The Eurographics Association, 2014) Müller, Christoph; Gärtner, Fabian; Jean-Jacques Bourdin and Joaquim Jorge and Eike Anderson
FUSEE ("Furtwangen University Simulation and Entertainment Engine") is a student project at Furtwangen University to develop a cross-platform real-time 3D engine from scratch. While about 20 students have been involved in the project's development so far, several more students have used the engine in class or during their own research projects while learning how a contemporary engine works behind the scenes. Furthermore, students can learn how programming languages such as C# and new trends such as HTML5 can be used for writing crossplatform applications. This paper describes the engine and its core functionality as well as the benefits the project provides for education in real-time 3D software development compared to classes where other engines are used.
SimSelect: Similarity-based Selection for 3D Surfaces
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2014) Guy, Emilie; Thiery, Jean-Marc; Boubekeur, Tamy; B. Levy and J. Kautz
Surface selection is one of the fundamental interactions in shape modeling. In the case of complex models, this task is often tedious for at least two reasons: firstly the local geometry of a given region may be hard to manually select and needs great accuracy; secondly the selection process may have to be repeated a large number of times for similar regions requiring similar subsequent editing. We propose SimSelect, a new system for interactive selection on 3D surfaces addressing these two issues. We cope with the accuracy issue by classifying selections in different types, namely components, parts and patches for which we independently optimize the selection process. Second, we address the repetitiveness issue by introducing an expansion process based on shape recognition which automatically retrieves potential selections similar to the user-defined one. As a result, our system provides the user with a compact set of simple interaction primitives providing a smooth select-and-edit workflow.
Game Level Layout from Design Specification
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2014) Ma, Chongyang; Vining, Nicholas; Lefebvre, Sylvain; Sheffer, Alla; B. Levy and J. Kautz
The design of video game environments, or levels, aims to control gameplay by steering the player through a sequence of designer-controlled steps, while simultaneously providing a visually engaging experience. Traditionally these levels are painstakingly designed by hand, often from pre-existing building blocks, or space templates. In this paper, we propose an algorithmic approach for automatically laying out game levels from user-specified blocks. Our method allows designers to retain control of the gameplay flow via user-specified level connectivity graphs, while relieving them from the tedious task of manually assembling the building blocks into a valid, plausible layout. Our method produces sequences of diverse layouts for the same input connectivity, allowing for repeated replay of a given level within a visually different, new environment. We support complex graph connectivities and various building block shapes, and are able to compute complex layouts in seconds. The two key components of our algorithm are the use of configuration spaces defining feasible relative positions of building blocks within a layout and a graph-decomposition based layout strategy that leverages graph connectivity to speed up convergence and avoid local minima. Together these two tools quickly steer the solution toward feasible layouts. We demonstrate our method on a variety of real-life inputs, and generate appealing layouts conforming to user specifications
Physically-based Simulation of Cuts in Deformable Bodies: A Survey
(The Eurographics Association, 2014) Wu, Jun; Westermann, Rüdiger; Dick, Christian; Sylvain Lefebvre and Michela Spagnuolo
Virtual cutting of deformable bodies has been an important and active research topic in physically-based simulation for more than a decade. A particular challenge in virtual cutting is the robust and efficient incorporation of cuts into an accurate computational model that is used for the simulation of the deformable body. This report presents a coherent summary of the state-of-the-art in virtual cutting of deformable bodies, focusing on the distinct geometrical and topological representations of the deformable body, as well as the specific numerical discretizations of the governing equations of motion. In particular, we discuss virtual cutting based on tetrahedral, hexahedral, and polyhedral meshes, in combination with standard, polyhedral, composite, and extended finite element discretizations. A separate section is devoted to meshfree methods. The report is complemented with an application study to assess the performance of virtual cutting simulators.
State of the Art in Surface Reconstruction from Point Clouds
(The Eurographics Association, 2014) Berger, Matthew; Tagliasacchi, Andrea; Seversky, Lee M.; Alliez, Pierre; Levine, Joshua A.; Sharf, Andrei; Silva, Claudio T.; Sylvain Lefebvre and Michela Spagnuolo
The area of surface reconstruction has seen substantial progress in the past two decades. The traditional problem addressed by surface reconstruction is to recover the digital representation of a physical shape that has been scanned, where the scanned data contains a wide variety of defects. While much of the earlier work has been focused on reconstructing a piece-wise smooth representation of the original shape, recent work has taken on more specialized priors to address significantly challenging data imperfections, where the reconstruction can take on different representations - not necessarily the explicit geometry. This state-of-the-art report surveys the field of surface reconstruction, providing a categorization with respect to priors, data imperfections, and reconstruction output. By considering a holistic view of surface reconstruction, this report provides a detailed characterization of the field, highlights similarities between diverse reconstruction techniques, and provides directions for future work in surface reconstruction.
Parameter Estimation and Comparative Evaluation of Crowd Simulations
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2014) Wolinski, David; Guy, Stephen; Olivier, Anne-Helene; Lin, Ming; Manocha, Dinesh; Pettré, Julien; B. Levy and J. Kautz
We present a novel framework to evaluate multi-agent crowd simulation algorithms based on real-world observations of crowd movements. A key aspect of our approach is to enable fair comparisons by automatically estimating the parameters that enable the simulation algorithms to best fit the given data. We formulate parameter estimation as an optimization problem, and propose a general framework to solve the combinatorial optimization problem for all parameterized crowd simulation algorithms. Our framework supports a variety of metrics to compare reference data and simulation outputs. The reference data may correspond to recorded trajectories, macroscopic parameters, or artist-driven sketches. We demonstrate the benefits of our framework for example-based simulation, modeling of cultural variations, artist-driven crowd animation, and relative comparison of some widely-used multi-agent simulation algorithms.
Art-Photographic Detail Enhancement
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2014) Son, Minjung; Lee, Yunjin; Kang, Henry; Lee, Seungyong; B. Levy and J. Kautz
We present a novel method for enhancing details in a digital photograph, inspired by the principle of art photography. In contrast to the previous methods that primarily rely on tone scaling, our technique provides a flexible tone transform model that consists of two operators: shifting and scaling. This model permits shifting of the tonal range in each image region to enable significant detail boosting regardless of the original tone. We optimize these shift and scale factors in our constrained optimization framework to achieve extreme detail enhancement across the image in a piecewise smooth fashion, as in art photography. The experimental results show that the proposed method brings out a significantly large amount of details even from an ordinary low-dynamic range image.
Data Driven Assembly of Procedurally Modeled Facilities
(The Eurographics Association, 2014) Bishop, M. Scott; Ferrer, Josè; Max, Nelson; Eric Galin and Michael Wand
We present a method to arrange components of industrial facilities in a constrained site footprint. We use a probabilistic graphical model of industrial sites and existing procedural modeling methods to automate the assembly and 3D modeling of wastewater treatment plants. A knowledge engineered approach produces a combination of components that inherently contains domain specific information like process dependencies and facility size. The inferred combination is laid out using mathematical optimization or via a physics-based simulation resulting in an arrangement that respects the industrial process and design plausibility.
On-line Real-time Physics-based Predictive Motion Control with Balance Recovery
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2014) Han, Daseong; Noh, Junyong; Jin, Xiaogang; Shin), Joseph S. Shin (formerly Sung Y.; B. Levy and J. Kautz
In this paper, we present an on-line real-time physics-based approach to motion control with contact repositioning based on a low-dimensional dynamics model using example motion data. Our approach first generates a reference motion in run time according to an on-line user request by transforming an example motion extracted from a motion library. Guided by the reference motion, it repeatedly generates an optimal control policy for a small time window one at a time for a sequence of partially overlapping windows, each covering a couple of footsteps of the reference motion, which supports an on-line performance. On top of this, our system dynamics and problem formulation allow to derive closed-form derivative functions by exploiting the low-dimensional dynamics model together with example motion data. These derivative functions and their sparse structures facilitate a real-time performance. Our approach also allows contact foot repositioning so as to robustly respond to an external perturbation or an environmental change as well as to perform locomotion tasks such as stepping on stones effectively.
Information-Guided Transfer Function Refinement
(The Eurographics Association, 2014) Luo, Shengzhou; Dingliana, John; Eric Galin and Michael Wand
This paper examines the methods for exploring volume data by optimization of visualization parameters. The size and complexity of the parameter space controlling the rendering process makes it challenging to generate an informative rendering. In particular, the specification of the transfer function (which is a mapping from data values to visual properties) is frequently a time-consuming and unintuitive task. We propose an information theory based approach to optimize the transfer function based on the intensity distribution of the volume data set and the ability for users to specify priority areas of importance in the resulting image in a simple and intuitive way. This optimization approach reduces the occlusion in the resulting images, and thus improves the perception of structures.
Towards Understanding Beautiful Things: A Computational Approach for the Study of Color Modulation in Visual Art
(The Eurographics Association, 2014) Agahchen, Anissa; Albu, Alexandra Branzan; Eric Galin and Michael Wand
This paper is a guided attempt at analyzing the aesthetics of color from the perspective of color theory. Our guides are the works of Johannes Itten, one of the most influential theorists of color aesthetics. We focus on one specific aspect of color usage in visual art, namely color modulation. To this purpose, we introduce the color palette, a novel 3D visualization of the chromatic information of an image in the HSL space. Moreover, we propose a set of simple descriptors for evaluating color modulation. Our approach is demonstrated on two case studies, which show that our measures on modulation are consistent with Itten s color theory. Ongoing work involves a thorough experimental exploration of the proposed color palette and modulation descriptors, in terms of their ability to discriminate between different artists and painting styles.
The Split Grid - A Hierarchical 1D-Grid-based Acceleration Data Structure for Ray Tracing
(The Eurographics Association, 2014) Bauszat, Pablo; Kastner, Marc Aurel; Eisemann, Martin; Magnor, Marcus; Mathias Paulin and Carsten Dachsbacher
We present a new acceleration structure for ray tracing called the Split Grid. Combining concepts of hierarchical grids, kd-trees and Bounding Volume Hierarchies (BVHs), our approach is based on the idea of nesting 1D-grids. Our proposed acceleration structure is compact in storage, adaptive to the scene geometry and can be traversed using a fast and efficient traversal scheme. We show that the Split Grid is comparable to other current state-of-theart acceleration structures regarding traversal performance and memory footprint. While other data structures usually achieve these levels of performance only due to a complex and expensive construction process (e.g. using the Surface Area Heuristic (SAH) [MB90]), our proposed Split Grid is built with a very simplistic construction scheme which is a major benefit of our approach.
Preface and Table of Contents
(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2014) B. Levy and J. Kautz
Laplacian Colormaps: a Framework for Structure-preserving Color Transformations
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2014) Eynard, Davide; Kovnatsky, Artiom; Bronstein, Michael M.; B. Levy and J. Kautz
Mappings between color spaces are ubiquitous in image processing problems such as gamut mapping, decolorization, and image optimization for color-blind people. Simple color transformations often result in information loss and ambiguities, and one wishes to find an image-specific transformation that would preserve as much as possible the structure of the original image in the target color space. In this paper, we propose Laplacian colormaps, a generic framework for structure-preserving color transformations between images. We use the image Laplacian to capture the structural information, and show that if the color transformation between two images preserves the structure, the respective Laplacians have similar eigenvectors, or in other words, are approximately jointly diagonalizable. Employing the relation between joint diagonalizability and commutativity of matrices, we use Laplacians commutativity as a criterion of color mapping quality and minimize it w.r.t. the parameters of a color transformation to achieve optimal structure preservation. We show numerous applications of our approach, including color-to-gray conversion, gamut mapping, multispectral image fusion, and image optimization for color deficient viewers.
Unsupervised Three-dimensional Reconstruction of Small Rocks from a Single Two-dimensional Image
(The Eurographics Association, 2014) Gilardi, Marco; Watten, Phil L.; Newbury, Paul; Eric Galin and Michael Wand
Surfaces covered with pebbles and small rocks can often be found in nature or in human-shaped environments. Generating an accurate three-dimensional model of these kind of surfaces from a reference image can be challenging, especially if one wants to be able to animate each pebble individually. To undertake this kind of task manually is time consuming and impossible to achieve in dynamic terrains animations. The method described in this paper allows unsupervised automatic generation of three-dimensional textured rocks from a two-dimensional image aiming to closely match the original image as much as possible.
HDR Imaging Using Augmented Lagrange Multipliers (ALM)
(The Eurographics Association, 2014) Bhardwaj, Adit; Raman, Shanmuganathan; Mathias Paulin and Carsten Dachsbacher
We consider the High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging problem for real world scenes. We can change either the exposure time or the aperture while capturing multiple images of the scene to generate an HDR image. This paper addresses the HDR imaging problem for static and dynamic scenes when we do not have any knowledge of the camera settings. We have proposed a novel threshold for Augmented Lagrange Multipliers (ALM) framework which enables us to process the images getting rid of artifacts due to moving objects and defocus blur.

Browse

Browsing EG2014 by Issue Date

Results Per Page

Sort Options