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Now showing 1 - 10 of 39
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    Interlocking Pieces for Printing Tangible Cultural Heritage Replicas
    (The Eurographics Association, 2014) Alemanno, Giuseppe; Cignoni, Paolo; Pietroni, Nico; Ponchio, Federico; Scopigno, Roberto; Reinhard Klein and Pedro Santos
    We propose a technique to decompose a 3D digital shape into a set of interlocking pieces that are easy to be manufactured and assembled. The pieces are designed so that they can be represented as a simple height field and, therefore, they can be manufactured by common 3D printers without the usage of supporting material. The removal of the supporting material is often a burdensome task and may eventually damage the surface of the printed object. Our approach makes the final reproduction cheaper, accurate and suitable for the reproduction of tangible cultural heritages. Moreover, since the proposed technique decomposes the artwork in pieces, it also overcomes the working space limits of common printers. The decomposition of the input (high-resolution) triangular mesh is driven by a coarse polygonal base mesh (representing the target subdivision in pieces); the height fields defining each piece are generated by sampling distances along the normal of each face composing the base mesh. A innovative interlocking mechanism allows adjacent pieces to plug each other to compose the final shape. This interlocking mechanism is designed to preserve the height field property of the pieces and to provide a sufficient degree of grip to ensure the assembled structure shape to be compact and stable. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach and show its limitations with some practical reproduction examples.
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    High Dynamic Range Point Clouds for Real-Time Relighting
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2019) Sabbadin, Manuele; Palma, Gianpaolo; BANTERLE, FRANCESCO; Boubekeur, Tamy; Cignoni, Paolo; Lee, Jehee and Theobalt, Christian and Wetzstein, Gordon
    Acquired 3D point clouds make possible quick modeling of virtual scenes from the real world.With modern 3D capture pipelines, each point sample often comes with additional attributes such as normal vector and color response. Although rendering and processing such data has been extensively studied, little attention has been devoted using the light transport hidden in the recorded per-sample color response to relight virtual objects in visual effects (VFX) look-dev or augmented reality (AR) scenarios. Typically, standard relighting environment exploits global environment maps together with a collection of local light probes to reflect the light mood of the real scene on the virtual object. We propose instead a unified spatial approximation of the radiance and visibility relationships present in the scene, in the form of a colored point cloud. To do so, our method relies on two core components: High Dynamic Range (HDR) expansion and real-time Point-Based Global Illumination (PBGI). First, since an acquired color point cloud typically comes in Low Dynamic Range (LDR) format, we boost it using a single HDR photo exemplar of the captured scene that can cover part of it. We perform this expansion efficiently by first expanding the dynamic range of a set of renderings of the point cloud and then projecting these renderings on the original cloud. At this stage, we propagate the expansion to the regions not covered by the renderings or with low-quality dynamic range by solving a Poisson system. Then, at rendering time, we use the resulting HDR point cloud to relight virtual objects, providing a diffuse model of the indirect illumination propagated by the environment. To do so, we design a PBGI algorithm that exploits the GPU's geometry shader stage as well as a new mipmapping operator, tailored for G-buffers, to achieve real-time performances. As a result, our method can effectively relight virtual objects exhibiting diffuse and glossy physically-based materials in real time. Furthermore, it accounts for the spatial embedding of the object within the 3D environment. We evaluate our approach on manufactured scenes to assess the error introduced at every step from the perfect ground truth. We also report experiments with real captured data, covering a range of capture technologies, from active scanning to multiview stereo reconstruction.
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    Evaluating Deep Learning Methods for Low Resolution Point Cloud Registration in Outdoor Scenarios
    (The Eurographics Association, 2021) Siddique, Arslan; Corsini, Massimiliano; Ganovelli, Fabio; Cignoni, Paolo; Frosini, Patrizio and Giorgi, Daniela and Melzi, Simone and Rodolà, Emanuele
    Point cloud registration is a fundamental task in 3D reconstruction and environment perception. We explore the performance of modern Deep Learning-based registration techniques, in particular Deep Global Registration (DGR) and Learning Multiview Registration (LMVR), on an outdoor real world data consisting of thousands of range maps of a building acquired by a Velodyne LIDAR mounted on a drone. We used these pairwise registration methods in a sequential pipeline to obtain an initial rough registration. The output of this pipeline can be further globally refined. This simple registration pipeline allow us to assess if these modern methods are able to deal with this low quality data. Our experiments demonstrated that, despite some design choices adopted to take into account the peculiarities of the data, more work is required to improve the results of the registration.
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    PileBars: Scalable Dynamic Thumbnail Bars
    (The Eurographics Association, 2012) Brivio, Paolo; Tarini, Marco; Ponchio, Federico; Cignoni, Paolo; Scopigno, Roberto; David Arnold and Jaime Kaminski and Franco Niccolucci and Andre Stork
    We introduce PileBars, a new class of animated thumbnail-bars supporting browsing of large image datasets (hundreds or thousands of images). Since the bar is meant to be just one element of a GUI, it covers only a small portion of the screen; yet it provides a global view of the entire dataset, without any scrolling panel. Instead, thumbnails are dynamically rearranged, resized and reclustered into adaptive layouts during the entire browsing process. The objective is to enable the user both to accurately pinpoint a specific image (even among semantically close ones), and to jump anywhere to ''distant'' parts of the dataset. The thumbnail layouts proposed maximize also the temporal coherence, thus allowing for smooth animations from one layout to the next. The system is very general: it can be driven by any application-specific image-to-image semantic distance function, and respects any user-defined total ordering of the images; the ordering can be either inferred from the semantic or be chosen independently from it, depending on the application. The applicability of the resulting system is tested in a number of practical applications and fits very well the issues in management of Cultural Heritage image collections.
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    Automatic Design of Cable‐Tensioned Glass Shells
    (© 2020 Eurographics ‐ The European Association for Computer Graphics and John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2020) Laccone, Francesco; Malomo, Luigi; Froli, Maurizio; Cignoni, Paolo; Pietroni, Nico; Benes, Bedrich and Hauser, Helwig
    We propose an optimization algorithm for the design of post‐tensioned architectural shell structures, composed of triangular glass panels, in which glass has a load‐bearing function. Due to its brittle nature, glass can fail when it is subject to tensile forces. Hence, we enrich the structure with a cable net, which is specifically designed to post‐tension the shell, relieving the underlying glass structure from tension. We automatically derive an optimized cable layout, together with the appropriate pre‐load of each cable. The method is driven by a physically based static analysis of the shell subject to its service load. We assess our approach by applying non‐linear finite element analysis to several real‐scale application scenarios. Such a method of cable tensioning produces glass shells that are optimized from the material usage viewpoint since they exploit the high compression strength of glass. As a result, they are lightweight and robust. Both aesthetic and static qualities are improved with respect to grid shell competitors.
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    Surface Light Field from Video Acquired in Uncontrolled Settings
    (The Eurographics Association, 2013) Palma, Gianpaolo; Desogus, Nicola; Cignoni, Paolo; Scopigno, Roberto; -
    This paper presents an algorithm for the estimation of the Surface Light Field using video sequences acquired moving the camera around the object. Unlike other state of the art methods, it does not require a uniform sampling density of the view directions, but it is able to build an approximation of the Surface Light Field starting from a biased video acquisition: dense along the camera path and completely missing in the other directions. The main idea is to separate the estimation of two components: the diffuse color, computed using statistical operations that allow the estimation of a rough approximation of the direction of the main light sources in the acquisition environment; the other residual Surface Light Field effects, modeled as linear combination of spherical functions. From qualitative and numerical evaluations, the final rendering results show a high fidelity and similarity with the input video frames, without ringing and banding effects.
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    Computational Design of Fabricable Geometric Patterns
    (The Eurographics Association, 2023) Scandurra, Elena; Laccone, Francesco; Malomo, Luigi; Callieri, Marco; Cignoni, Paolo; Giorgi, Daniela; Banterle, Francesco; Caggianese, Giuseppe; Capece, Nicola; Erra, Ugo; Lupinetti, Katia; Manfredi, Gilda
    This paper addresses the design of surfaces as assemblies of geometric patterns with predictable performance in response to mechanical stimuli. We design a family of tileable and fabricable patterns represented as triangle meshes, which can be assembled for creating surface tessellations. First, a regular recursive subdivision of the planar space generates different geometric configurations for candidate patterns, having interesting and varied aesthetic properties. Then, a refinement step addresses manufacturability by solving for non-manifold configurations and sharp angles which would produce disconnected or fragile patterns. We simulate our patterns to evaluate their mechanical response when loaded in different scenarios targeting out-of-plane bending. Through a simple browsing interface, we show that our patterns span a variety of different bending behaviors. The result is a library of patterns with varied aesthetics and predefined mechanical behavior, to use for the direct design of mechanical metamaterials. To assess the feasibility of our approach, we show a pair of fabricated 3D objects with different curvatures.
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    Generalized Trackball for Surfing Over Surfaces
    (The Eurographics Association, 2016) Malomo, Luigi; Cignoni, Paolo; Scopigno, Roberto; Giovanni Pintore and Filippo Stanco
    We present an efficient 3D interaction technique: generalizing the well known trackball approach, this technique unifies and blends the two common interaction mechanisms known as panning and orbiting. The approach allows to inspect a virtual object by navigating over its surrounding space, remaining at a chosen distance and performing an automatic panning over its surface. This generalized trackball allows an intuitive navigation of topologically complex shapes, enabling unexperienced users to visit hard-to-reach parts better and faster than with standard GUI components. The approach is based on the construction of multiple smooth approximations of the model under inspection; at rendering time, it constrains the camera to stay at a given distance to these approximations. The approach requires negligible preprocessing and memory overhead and works well for both mousebased and touch interfaces. An informal user study confirms the impact of the proposed technique.
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    Detection of Geometric Temporal Changes in Point Clouds
    (Copyright © 2016 The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Palma, Gianpaolo; Cignoni, Paolo; Boubekeur, Tamy; Scopigno, Roberto; Chen, Min and Zhang, Hao (Richard)
    Detecting geometric changes between two 3D captures of the same location performed at different moments is a critical operation for all systems requiring a precise segmentation between change and no‐change regions. Such application scenarios include 3D surface reconstruction, environment monitoring, natural events management and forensic science. Unfortunately, typical 3D scanning setups cannot provide any one‐to‐one mapping between measured samples in static regions: in particular, both extrinsic and intrinsic sensor parameters may vary over time while sensor noise and outliers additionally corrupt the data. In this paper, we adopt a multi‐scale approach to robustly tackle these issues. Starting from two point clouds, we first remove outliers using a probabilistic operator. Then, we detect the actual change using the implicit surface defined by the point clouds under a Growing Least Square reconstruction that, compared to the classical proximity measure, offers a more robust change/no‐change characterization near the temporal intersection of the scans and in the areas exhibiting different sampling density and direction. The resulting classification is enhanced with a spatial reasoning step to solve critical geometric configurations that are common in man‐made environments. We validate our approach on a synthetic test case and on a collection of real data sets acquired using commodity hardware. Finally, we show how 3D reconstruction benefits from the resulting precise change/no‐change segmentation.Detecting geometric changes between two 3D captures of the same location performed at different moments is a critical operation for all systems requiring a precise segmentation between change and no‐change regions. Unfortunately, typical 3D scanning setups cannot provide any oneto‐one mapping between measured samples in static regions: both extrinsic and intrinsic sensor parameters may vary over time while sensor noise and outliers additionally corrupt the data. In this paper, we adopt a multi‐scale approach to robustly tackle these issues, obtaining a robust segmentation near the temporal intersection of the scans and in the areas with different sampling density and direction.
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    A Computational Tool for the Analysis of 3D Bending-active Structures Based on the Dynamic Relaxation Method
    (The Eurographics Association, 2022) Manolas, Iason; Laccone, Francesco; Cherchi, Gianmarco; Malomo, Luigi; Cignoni, Paolo; Cabiddu, Daniela; Schneider, Teseo; Allegra, Dario; Catalano, Chiara Eva; Cherchi, Gianmarco; Scateni, Riccardo
    The use of elastic deformation of straight or flat structural components for achieving complex 3D shapes has acquired attention from recent computational design works, particularly in architectural geometry. The so-called bending-active structures are built by deforming and restraining the components mutually to form a stable configuration. While the manufacturing of components from flat raw material and their assembly are simple and inexpensive, the complexity lies in the design phase, in which computational tools are required to predict the deformation and forces under a prescribed form-finding load or displacement. Currently, there is a scarcity of open and efficient tools that hinder the design of bending-active structures. This paper proposes and validates an open-source computational tool for predicting the static equilibrium of general bending-active structures in the form of a network of elements using the dynamic relaxation method. We apply our tool to various real-world examples and compare the results to a commercial FEM solver. The proposed tool shows accuracy and good time performance, making it a significant addition to the available open-source structural engineering toolkit.