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Now showing 1 - 10 of 33
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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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    Adaptive Clipping of Splats to Models with Sharp Features
    (The Eurographics Association, 2014) Ivo, Rafael; Ganovelli, Fabio; Vidal, Creto; Scopigno, Roberto; Andrea Giachetti
    Splat-based models are a good representation because of its absense of topology, making complex modeling operations easier, but keeping the same approximation ratio from triangular meshes. However corners cannot be properly represented by splats without clipping them. We present a new method for clipping splats in models with sharp features. Each splat is an ellipse equipped with a few parameters that allow to define how the ellipse can be clipped against a bidimensional rational Bézier curve and thus it can be used for all those surfaces that show a large number of edge features and different sampling rate around them. The simple and uniform data used to define the clipping curve makes easy the implementation in GPU. We designed and implemented an automatic computation of the clipping curves and a pipeline for sampling a generic surface with splats and render it. In this paper we show how this technique outperforms the previous clipping techniques in precision for objects such as mechanical parts and CAD- like models keeping the rendering speed.
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    Geometry-aware Video Registration
    (The Eurographics Association, 2010) Palma, Gianpalo; Callieri, Marco; Dellepiane, Matteo; Corsini, Massimiliano; Scopigno, Roberto; Reinhard Koch and Andreas Kolb and Christof Rezk-Salama
    We present a new method for the accurate registration of video sequences of a real object over its dense triangular mesh. The goal is to obtain an accurate video-to-geometry registration to allow the bidirectional data transfer between the 3D model and the video using the perspective projection defined by the camera model. Our solution uses two different approaches: feature-based registration by KLT video tracking, and statistic-based registration by maximizing the Mutual Information (MI) between the gradient of the frame and the gradient of the rendering of the 3D model with some illumination related properties, such as surface normals and ambient occlusion. While the first approach allows a fast registration of short sequences with simple camera movements, the MI is used to correct the drift problem that KLT tracker produces over long sequences, due to the incremental tracking and the camera motion. We demonstrate, using synthetic sequences, that the alignment error obtained with our method is smaller than the one introduced by KLT, and we show the results of some interesting and challenging real sequences of objects of different sizes, acquired under different conditions.
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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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    Two Examples of GPGPU Acceleration of Memory-intensive Algorithms
    (The Eurographics Association, 2010) Marras, Stefano; Mura, Claudio; Gobbetti, Enrico; Scateni, Riccardo; Scopigno, Roberto; Enrico Puppo and Andrea Brogni and Leila De Floriani
    The advent of GPGPU technologies has allowed for sensible speed-ups in many high-dimension, memory-intensive computational problems. In this paper we demonstrate the e ectiveness of such techniques by describing two applications of GPGPU computing to two di erent subfields of computer graphics, namely computer vision and mesh processing. In the first case, CUDA technology is employed to accelerate the computation of approximation of motion between two images, known also as optical flow. As for mesh processing, we exploit the massivelyparallel architecture of CUDA devices to accelerate the face clustering procedure that is employed in many recent mesh segmentation algorithms. In both cases, the results obtained so far are presented and thoroughly discussed, along with the expected future development of the work.
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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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    A computer-assisted constraint-based system for assembling fragmented objects
    (The Eurographics Association, 2013) Palmas, Gregorio; Pietroni, Nico; Cignoni, Paolo; Scopigno, Roberto; -
    We propose a computer-assisted constraint-based methodology for virtual reassembly of Cultural Heritage (CH) artworks. Instead than focusing on automatic, unassisted reassembly, we targeted the scenarios where the reconstruction process is not be based on shape properties only but it is build over the experience and intuition of a CH expert. Our purpose is therefore to design a flexible interactive system, based on the selection of a set of constraints which relates different fragments, according to the understanding and experience of the CH operator. Once the user has defined those constraints, the system searches for a suitable solution, using a global energy minimization strategy that considers simultaneously all the pieces involved in the reconstruction process. Additionally, our framework provides the possibility to work in a hierarchical way, mimicking the traditional physical procedure that archaeologists use to reassemble tangible fractured objects. The frameworks is designed to work even with fragments that could have been severely damaged or eroded. On those datasets, automatic approaches may often fail, since the fractured regions do not contain enough geometric information to infer the correct matches. We present some successful uses of our framework on real application scenarios.
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    Improving High-Speed Scanning Systems by Photometric Stereo
    (The Eurographics Association, 2011) Larue, Frédéric; Dellepiane, Matteo; Scopigno, Roberto; Franco Niccolucci and Matteo Dellepiane and Sebastian Pena Serna and Holly Rushmeier and Luc Van Gool
    High-speed scanning systems can be extremely valuable for Cultural Heritage applications, especially when large collections of small objects have to be acquired. However, fine details may not be acquired using this technology. Nevertheless, it is possible to try to recover them by taking advantage of the additional data provided by these systems: the calibrated video sequence of the acquisition, and the position of the projector light for each frame. In this paper, we propose a workflow that processes the video sequence with a photometric stereo approach, in order to refine the coarse geometry provided by the scanner. A normal map is first extracted by a method that accounts for the unevenly distributed sampling that generally results from the particular trajectory followed by this kind of scanners during the acquisition. This normal map is then integrated in order to recover missing geometric features. Good performances are achieved, since the whole workflow is particularly suited to GPU programming.
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    A Statistical Method for SVBRDF Approximation from Video Sequences in General Lighting Conditions
    (The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2012) Palma, Gianpaolo; Callieri, Marco; Dellepiane, Matteo; Scopigno, Roberto; Fredo Durand and Diego Gutierrez
    We present a statistical method for the estimation of the Spatially Varying Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function (SVBRDF) of an object with complex geometry, starting from video sequences acquired with fixed but general lighting conditions. The aim of this work is to define a method that simplifies the acquisition phase of the object surface appearance and allows to reconstruct an approximated SVBRDF. The final output is suitable to be used with a 3D model of the object to obtain accurate and photo-realistic renderings. The method is composed by three steps: the approximation of the environment map of the acquisition scene, using the same object as a probe; the estimation of the diffuse color of the object; the estimation of the specular components of the main materials of the object, by using a Phong model. All the steps are based on statistical analysis of the color samples projected by the video sequences on the surface of the object. Although the method presents some limitations, the trade-off between the easiness of acquisition and the obtained results makes it useful for practical applications.
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    Alchemy in 3D - A Digitization for a Journey Through Matter
    (IEEE, 2015) Callieri, Marco; Pingi, Paolo; Potenziani, Marco; Dellepiane, Matteo; Pavoni, Gaia; Lureau, Aurelia; Scopigno, Roberto; Gabriele Guidi and Roberto Scopigno and Pere Brunet
    In this work, we will present the outcomes of the 3D diagnostic investigations carried out on the painting Alchemy by Jackson Pollock. Thanks to an accurate digitization and a careful processing, we were able to generate a very precise high-resolution 3D model that proved to be useful in different stages of the diagnostic and conservation campaign. The 3D model was integrated in the conservation process, along with the other diagnostic investigations; the geometric data was also used to produce images and video sequences for dissemination purposes. The most interesting aspect of the work, however, was the idea of going beyond photo-realism and the use of the scanner-measured geometry to try to interpret and understand the traces and signs on the surface of the painting, in relation with the gestures and techniques used by Pollock while painting this masterpiece. Combining the knowledge of the curators and the metric data gathered in the digitization, we were able to discover and validate several interesting aspects of the painting, in the direction of trying to better understanding the painting process which was, in the idea of the artist, an essential part of the artwork. The 3D model of the artwork played a central role also in the temporary exhibition created for the dissemination of the conservation and the diagnostic campaign to the museum visitors. This was also done following the idea of using the geometry to explain the gestures, actions and techniques of Jackson Pollock at work. The 3D model was used to create an interactive kiosk, to have the visitors navigate the model and access explanations of relevant geometrical details and to produce a 1:1 physical reproduction to give the public the possibility to physically interact with the artwork.