Full Papers 2008 - CGF 27-Issue 2

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https://diglib.eg.org/handle/10.2312/13880

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Photo-realistic Rendering of Metallic Car Paint from Image-Based Measurements
(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2008) Rump, Martin; Mueller, Gero; Sarlette, Ralf; Koch, Dirk; Klein, Reinhard
State-of-the-art car paint shows not only interesting and subtle angular dependency but also significant spatial variation. Especially in sunlight these variations remain visible even for distances up to a few meters and give the coating a strong impression of depth which cannot be reproduced by a single BRDF model and the kind of procedural noise textures typically used. Instead of explicitly modeling the responsible effect particles we propose to use image-based reflectance measurements of real paint samples and represent their spatial varying part by Bidirectional Texture Functions (BTF). We use classical BRDF models like Cook-Torrance to represent the reflection behavior of the base paint and the highly specular finish and demonstrate how the parameters of these models can be derived from the BTF measurements. For rendering, the image-based spatially varying part is compressed and efficiently synthesized. This paper introduces the first hybrid analytical and image-based representation for car paint and enables the photo-realistic rendering of all significant effects of highly complex coatings.
GPU-based Fast Ray Casting for a Large Number of Metaballs
(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2008) Kanamori, Yoshihiro; Szego, Zoltan; Nishita, Tomoyuki
Metaballs are implicit surfaces widely used to model curved objects, represented by the isosurface of a density field defined by a set of points. Recently, the results of particle-based simulations have been often visualized using a large number of metaballs, however, such visualizations have high rendering costs. In this paper we propose a fast technique for rendering metaballs on the GPU. Instead of using polygonization, the isosurface is directly evaluated in a per-pixel manner. For such evaluation, all metaballs contributing to the isosurface need to be extracted along each viewing ray, on the limited memory of GPUs. We handle this by keeping a list of metaballs contributing to the isosurface and efficiently update it. Our method neither requires expensive precomputation nor acceleration data structures often used in existing ray tracing techniques. With several optimizations, we can display a large number of moving metaballs quickly.
Real-Time Translucent Rendering Using GPU-based Texture Space Importance Sampling
(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2008) Chang, Chih-Wen; Lin, Wen-Chieh; Ho, Tan-Chi; Huang, Tsung-Shian; Chuang, Jung-Hong
We present a novel approach for real-time rendering of translucent surfaces. The computation of subsurface scattering is performed by first converting the integration over the 3D model surface into an integration over a 2D texture space and then applying importance sampling based on the irradiance stored in the texture. Such a conversion leads to a feasible GPU implementation and makes real-time frame rate possible. Our implementation shows that plausible images can be rendered in real time for complex translucent models with dynamic light and material properties. For objects with more apparent local effect, our approach generally requires more samples that may downgrade the frame rate. To deal with this case, we decompose the integration into two parts, one for local effect and the other for global effect, which are evaluated by the combination of available methods [DS03, MKB* 03a] and our texture space importance sampling, respectively. Such a hybrid scheme is able to steadily render the translucent effect in real time with a fixed amount of samples.
Fast Force Field Approximation and its Application to Skeletonization of Discrete 3D Objects
(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2008) Brunner, D.; Brunnett, G.
In this paper we present a novel method to approximate the force field of a discrete 3d object with a time complexity that is linear in the number of voxels. We define a rule, similar to the distance transform, to propagate forces associated with boundary points into the interior of the object. The result of this propagation depends on the order in which the points of the object are processed. Therefore we analyze how to obtain an order-invariant approximation formula. With the resulting formula it becomes possible to approximate the force field and to use its features for a fast and topology preserving skeletonization. We use a thinning strategy on the body-centered cubic lattice to compute the skeleton and ensure that critical points of the force field are not removed. This leads to improved skeletons with respect to the properties of centeredness and rotational invariance.
Accurate Shadows by Depth Complexity Sampling
(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2008) Forest, Vincent; Barthe, Loic; Paulin, Mathias
The accurate generation of soft shadows is a particularly computationally intensive task. In order to reduce rendering time, most real-time and offline applications decorrelate the generation of shadows from the computation of lighting. In addition to such approximations, they generate shadows using some restrictive assumptions only correct in very specific cases, leading to penumbra over-estimation or light-leaking artifacts. In this paper we present an algorithm that produces soft shadows without exhibiting the previous drawbacks. Using a new efficient evaluation of the number of occluders between two points (i.e. the depth complexity) we either modulate direct lighting or numerically solve the rendering equation for direct illumination. Our approach approximates shadows cast by semi-opaque occluders and naturally handles area lights with spatially varying luminance. Furthermore, depending on the desired performance and quality, the resulting shadows are either very close to, or as accurate as, a ray-traced reference. As a result, the presented method is well suited to many domains, ranging from quality-sensitive to performance-critical applications.
Surface Reconstruction From Non-parallel Curve Networks
(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2008) Liu, L.; Bajaj, C.; Deasy, J. O.; Low, D. A.; Ju, T.
Building surfaces from cross-section curves has wide applications including bio-medical modeling. Previous work in this area has mostly focused on connecting simple closed curves on parallel cross-sections. Here we consider the more general problem where input data may lie on non-parallel cross-sections and consist of curve networks that represent the segmentation of the underlying object by different material or tissue types (e.g., skin, muscle, bone, etc.) on each cross-section. The desired output is a surface network that models both the exterior surface and the internal partitioning of the object. We introduce an algorithm that is capable of handling curve networks of arbitrary shape and topology on cross-section planes with arbitrary orientations. Our algorithm is simple to implement and is guaranteed to produce a closed surface network that interpolates the curve network on each cross-section. Our method is demonstrated on both synthetic and bio-medical examples.
Sketching and Composing Widgets for 3D Manipulation
(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2008) Schmidt, Ryan; Singh, Karan; Balakrishnan, Ravin
We present an interface for 3D object manipulation in which standard transformation tools are replaced with transient 3D widgets invoked by sketching context-dependent strokes. The widgets are automatically aligned to axes and planes determined by the user s stroke. Sketched pivot-points further expand the interaction vocabulary. Using gestural commands, these basic elements can be assembled into dynamic, user-constructed 3D transformation systems. We supplement precise widget interaction with techniques for coarse object positioning and snapping. Our approach, which is implemented within a broader sketch-based modeling system, also integrates an underlying widget history to enable the fluid transfer of widgets between objects. An evaluation indicates that users familiar with 3D manipulation concepts can be taught how to efficiently use our system in under an hour.
Curvature-Domain Shape Processing
(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2008) Eigensatz, Michael; Sumner, Robert W.; Pauly, Mark
We propose a framework for 3D geometry processing that provides direct access to surface curvature to facilitate advanced shape editing, filtering, and synthesis algorithms. The central idea is to map a given surface to the curvature domain by evaluating its principle curvatures, apply filtering and editing operations to the curvature distribution, and reconstruct the resulting surface using an optimization approach. Our system allows the user to prescribe arbitrary principle curvature values anywhere on the surface. The optimization solves a nonlinear least-squares problem to find the surface that best matches the desired target curvatures while preserving important properties of the original shape. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this processing metaphor with several applications, including anisotropic smoothing, feature enhancement, and multi-scale curvature editing.
Detail-In-Context Visualization for Satellite Imagery
(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2008) Boettger, Joachim; Preiser, Martin; Balzer, Michael; Deussen, Oliver
We use the complex logarithm as a transformation for the visualization and navigation of highly complex satellite and aerial imagery. The resulting depictions show details and context with greatly different scales in one seamless image while avoiding local distortions. We motivate our approach by showing its relations to the ordinary perspective views and classical map projections. We discuss how to organize and process the huge amount of imagery in realtime using modern graphics hardware with an extended clipmapping technique. Finally, we provide details and experiences concerning the interpretation of and interaction with the resulting representations.
High-Resolution Volumetric Computation of Offset Surfaces with Feature Preservation
(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2008) Pavic, Darko; Kobbelt, Leif
We present a new algorithm for the efficient and reliable generation of offset surfaces for polygonal meshes. The algorithm is robust with respect to degenerate configurations and computes (self-)intersection free offsets that do not miss small and thin components. The results are correct within a prescribed ?-tolerance. This is achieved by using a volumetric approach where the offset surface is defined as the union of a set of spheres, cylinders, and prisms instead of surface-based approaches that generally construct an offset surface by shifting the input mesh in normal direction. Since we are using the unsigned distance field, we can handle any type of topological inconsistencies including non-manifold configurations and degenerate triangles. A simple but effective mesh operation allows us to detect and include sharp features (shocks) into the output mesh and to preserve them during post-processing (decimation and smoothing). We discretize the distance function by an efficient multi-level scheme on an adaptive octree data structure. The problem of limited voxel resolutions inherent to every volumetric approach is avoided by breaking the bounding volume into smaller tiles and processing them independently. This allows for almost arbitrarily high voxel resolutions on a commodity PC while keeping the output mesh complexity low. The quality and performance of our algorithm is demonstrated for a number of challenging examples.
Fluid in Video: Augmenting Real Video with Simulated Fluids
(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2008) Kwatra, Vivek; Mordohai, Philippos; Narain, Rahul; Penta, Sashi Kumar; Carlsonk, Mark; Pollefeys, Marc; Lin, Ming C.
We present a technique for coupling simulated fluid phenomena that interact with real dynamic scenes captured as a binocular video sequence. We first process the binocular video sequence to obtain a complete 3D reconstruction of the scene, including velocity information. We use stereo for the visible parts of 3D geometry and surface completion to fill the missing regions. We then perform fluid simulation within a 3D domain that contains the object, enabling one-way coupling from the video to the fluid. In order to maintain temporal consistency of the reconstructed scene and the animated fluid across frames, we develop a geometry tracking algorithm that combines optic flow and depth information with a novel technique for velocity completion . The velocity completion technique uses local rigidity constraints to hypothesize a motion field for the entire 3D shape, which is then used to propagate and filter the reconstructed shape over time. This approach not only generates smoothly varying geometry across time, but also simultaneously provides the necessary boundary conditions for one-way coupling between the dynamic geometry and the simulated fluid. Finally, we employ a GPU based scheme for rendering the synthetic fluid in the real video, taking refraction and scene texture into account.
Automatic Conversion of Mesh Animations into Skeleton-based Animations
(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2008) De Aguiar, Edilson; Theobalt, Christian; Thrun, Sebastian; Seidel, Hans-Peter
Recently, it has become increasingly popular to represent animations not by means of a classical skeleton-based model, but in the form of deforming mesh sequences. The reason for this new trend is that novel mesh deformation methods as well as new surface based scene capture techniques offer a great level of flexibility during animation creation. Unfortunately, the resulting scene representation is less compact than skeletal ones and there is not yet a rich toolbox available which enables easy post-processing and modification of mesh animations. To bridge this gap between the mesh-based and the skeletal paradigm, we propose a new method that automatically extracts a plausible kinematic skeleton, skeletal motion parameters, as well as surface skinning weights from arbitrary mesh animations. By this means, deforming mesh sequences can be fully-automatically transformed into fullyrigged virtual subjects. The original input can then be quickly rendered based on the new compact bone and skin representation, and it can be easily modified using the full repertoire of already existing animation tools.
Render2MPEG: A Perception-based Framework Towards Integrating Rendering and Video Compression
(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2008) Herzog, Robert; Kinuwaki, Shinichi; Myszkowski, Karol; Seidel, Hans-Peter
Currently 3D animation rendering and video compression are completely independent processes even if rendered frames are streamed on-the-fly within a client-server platform. In such scenario, which may involve time-varying transmission bandwidths and different display characteristics at the client side, dynamic adjustment of the rendering quality to such requirements can lead to a better use of server resources. In this work, we present a framework where the renderer and MPEG codec are coupled through a straightforward interface that provides precise motion vectors from the rendering side to the codec and perceptual error thresholds for each pixel in the opposite direction. The perceptual error thresholds take into account bandwidth-dependent quantization errors resulting from the lossy com-pression as well as image content-dependent luminance and spatial contrast masking. The availability of the discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficients at the codec side enables to use advanced models of the human visual system (HVS) in the perceptual error threshold derivation without incurring any significant cost. Those error thresholds are then used to control the rendering quality and make it well aligned with the compressed stream quality. In our prototype system we use the lightcuts technique developed by Walter et al., which we enhance to handle dynamic image sequences, and an MPEG-2 implementation. Our results clearly demonstrate many advantages of coupling the rendering with video compression in terms of faster rendering. Furthermore, temporally coherent rendering leads to a reduction of temporal artifacts.
Practical Product Importance Sampling for Direct Illumination
(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2008) Clarberg, Petrik; Akenine-Moeller, Tomas
We present a practical algorithm for sampling the product of environment map lighting and surface reflectance. Our method builds on wavelet-based importance sampling, but has a number of important advantages over previous methods. Most importantly, we avoid using precomputed reflectance functions by sampling the BRDF on-the-fly. Hence, all types of materials can be handled, including anisotropic and spatially varying BRDFs, as well as procedural shaders. This also opens up for using very high resolution, uncompressed, environment maps. Our results show that this gives a significant reduction of variance compared to using lower resolution approximations. In addition, we study the wavelet product, and present a faster algorithm geared for sampling purposes. For our application, the computations are reduced to a simple quadtree-based multiplication. We build the BRDF approximation and evaluate the product in a single tree traversal, which makes the algorithm both faster and more flexible than previous methods.
Interactive Volume Rendering with Dynamic Ambient Occlusion and Color Bleeding
(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2008) Ropinski, Timo; Meyer-Spradow, Jennis; Diepenbrock, Stefan; Mensmann, Joerg; Hinrichs, Klaus
We propose a method for rendering volumetric data sets at interactive frame rates while supporting dynamic ambient occlusion as well as an approximation to color bleeding. In contrast to ambient occlusion approaches for polygonal data, techniques for volumetric data sets have to face additional challenges, since by changing rendering parameters, such as the transfer function or the thresholding, the structure of the data set and thus the light interactions may vary drastically. Therefore, during a preprocessing step which is independent of the rendering parameters we capture light interactions for all combinations of structures extractable from a volumetric data set. In order to compute the light interactions between the different structures, we combine this preprocessed information during rendering based on the rendering parameters defined interactively by the user. Thus our method supports interactive exploration of a volumetric data set but still gives the user control over the most important rendering parameters. For instance, if the user alters the transfer function to extract different structures from a volumetric data set the light interactions between the extracted structures are captured in the rendering while still allowing interactive frame rates. Compared to known local illumination models for volume rendering our method does not introduce any substantial rendering overhead and can be integrated easily into existing volume rendering applications. In this paper we will explain our approach, discuss the implications for interactive volume rendering and present the achieved results.
GPU Accelerated Direct Volume Rendering on an Interactive Light Field Display
(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2008) Agus, Marco; Gobbetti, Enrico; Guitian, Jose Antonio Iglesias; Marton, Fabio; Pintore, Giovanni
We present a GPU accelerated volume ray casting system interactively driving a multi-user light field display. The display, driven by a single programmable GPU, is based on a specially arranged array of projectors and a holographic screen and provides full horizontal parallax. The characteristics of the display are exploited to develop a specialized volume rendering technique able to provide multiple freely moving naked-eye viewers the illusion of seeing and manipulating virtual volumetric objects floating in the display workspace. In our approach, a GPU ray-caster follows rays generated by a multiple-center-of-projection technique while sampling pre-filtered versions of the dataset at resolutions that match the varying spatial accuracy of the display. The method achieves interactive performance and provides rapid visual understanding of complex volumetric data sets even when using depth oblivious compositing techniques.
Reduced Depth and Visual Hulls of Complex 3D Scenes
(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2008) Bogomjakov, Alexander; Gotsman, Craig
Depth and visual hulls are useful for quick reconstruction and rendering of a 3D object based on a number of reference views. However, for many scenes, especially multi-object, these hulls may contain significant artifacts known as phantom geometry. In depth hulls the phantom geometry appears behind the scene objects in regions occluded from all the reference views. In visual hulls the phantom geometry may also appear in front of the objects because there is not enough information to unambiguously imply the object positions.In this work we identify which parts of the depth and visual hull might constitute phantom geometry. We define the notion of reduced depth hull and reduced visual hull as the parts of the corresponding hull that are phantom-free. We analyze the role of the depth information in identification of the phantom geometry. Based on this, we provide an algorithm for rendering the reduced depth hull at interactive frame-rates and suggest an approach for rendering the reduced visual hull. The rendering algorithms take advantage of modern GPU programming techniques.Our techniques bypass explicit reconstruction of the hulls, rendering the reduced depth or visual hull directly from the reference views.
Viewfinder Alignment
(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2008) Adams, Andrew; Gelfand, Natasha; Pulli, Kari
The viewfinder of a digital camera has traditionally been used for one purpose: to display to the user a preview of what is seen through the camera s lens. High quality cameras are now available on devices such as mobile phones and PDAs, which provide a platform where the camera is a programmable device, enabling applications such as online computational photography, computer vision-based interactive gaming, and augmented reality. For such online applications, the camera viewfinder provides the user s main interaction with the environment. In this paper, we describe an algorithm for aligning successive viewfinder frames. First, an estimate of inter-frame translation is computed by aligning integral projections of edges in two images. The estimate is then refined to compute a full 2D similarity transformation by aligning point features. Our algorithm is robust to noise, never requires storing more than one viewfinder frame in memory, and runs at 30 frames per second on standard smartphone hardware. We use viewfinder alignment for panorama capture, low-light photography, and a camera-based game controller.
Expressive Facial Gestures From Motion Capture Data
(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2008) Ju, Eunjung; Lee, Jehee
Human facial gestures often exhibit such natural stochastic variations as how often the eyes blink, how often the eyebrows and the nose twitch, and how the head moves while speaking. The stochastic movements of facial features are key ingredients for generating convincing facial expressions. Although such small variations have been simulated using noise functions in many graphics applications, modulating noise functions to match natural variations induced from the affective states and the personality of characters is difficult and not intuitive. We present a technique for generating subtle expressive facial gestures (facial expressions and head motion) semi-automatically from motion capture data. Our approach is based on Markov random fields that are simulated in two levels. In the lower level, the coordinated movements of facial features are captured, parameterized, and transferred to synthetic faces using basis shapes. The upper level represents independent stochastic behavior of facial features. The experimental results show that our system generates expressive facial gestures synchronized with input speech.
Higher Order Barycentric Coordinates
(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2008) Langer, Torsten; Seidel, Hans-Peter
In recent years, a wide range of generalized barycentric coordinates has been suggested. However, all of them lack control over derivatives. We show how the notion of barycentric coordinates can be extended to specify derivatives at control points. This is also known as Hermite interpolation. We introduce a method to modify existing barycentric coordinates to higher order barycentric coordinates and demonstrate, using higher order mean value coordinates, that our method, although conceptually simple and easy to implement, can be used to give easy and intuitive control at interactive frame rates over local space deformations such as rotations.

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