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Now showing 1 - 10 of 32
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    Stereo from Shading
    (The Eurographics Association, 2015) Chapiro, Alexandre; O'Sullivan, Carol; Jarosz, Wojciech; Gross, Markus; Smolic, Aljoscha; Jaakko Lehtinen and Derek Nowrouzezahrai
    We present a new method for creating and enhancing the stereoscopic 3D (S3D) sensation without using the parallax disparity between an image pair. S3D relies on a combination of cues to generate a feeling of depth, but only a few of these cues can easily be modified within a rendering pipeline without significantly changing the content. We explore one such cue-shading stereopsis-which to date has not been exploited for 3D rendering. By changing only the shading of objects between the left and right eye renders, we generate a noticeable increase in perceived depth. This effect can be used to create depth when applied to flat images, and to enhance depth when applied to shallow depth S3D images. Our method modifies the shading normals of objects or materials, such that it can be flexibly and selectively applied in complex scenes with arbitrary numbers and types of lights and indirect illumination. Our results show examples of rendered stills and video, as well as live action footage.
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    Recent Advances in Adaptive Sampling and Reconstruction for Monte Carlo Rendering
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2015) Zwicker, Matthias; Jarosz, Wojciech; Lehtinen, Jaakko; Moon, Bochang; Ramamoorthi, Ravi; Rousselle, Fabrice; Sen, Pradeep; Soler, Cyril; Yoon, Sungeui E.; K. Hormann and O. Staadt
    Monte Carlo integration is firmly established as the basis for most practical realistic image synthesis algorithms because of its flexibility and generality. However, the visual quality of rendered images often suffers from estimator variance, which appears as visually distracting noise. Adaptive sampling and reconstruction algorithms reduce variance by controlling the sampling density and aggregating samples in a reconstruction step, possibly over large image regions. In this paper we survey recent advances in this area. We distinguish between “a priori” methods that analyze the light transport equations and derive sampling rates and reconstruction filters from this analysis, and “a posteriori” methods that apply statistical techniques to sets of samples to drive the adaptive sampling and reconstruction process. They typically estimate the errors of several reconstruction filters, and select the best filter locally to minimize error. We discuss advantages and disadvantages of recent state-of-the-art techniques, and provide visual and quantitative comparisons. Some of these techniques are proving useful in real-world applications, and we aim to provide an overview for practitioners and researchers to assess these approaches. In addition, we discuss directions for potential further improvements.
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    Path-space Motion Estimation and Decomposition for Robust Animation Filtering
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2015) Zimmer, Henning; Rousselle, Fabrice; Jakob, Wenzel; Wang, Oliver; Adler, David; Jarosz, Wojciech; Sorkine-Hornung, Olga; Sorkine-Hornung, Alexander; Jaakko Lehtinen and Derek Nowrouzezahrai
    Renderings of animation sequences with physics-based Monte Carlo light transport simulations are exceedingly costly to generate frame-by-frame, yet much of this computation is highly redundant due to the strong coherence in space, time and among samples. A promising approach pursued in prior work entails subsampling the sequence in space, time, and number of samples, followed by image-based spatio-temporal upsampling and denoising. These methods can provide significant performance gains, though major issues remain: firstly, in a multiple scattering simulation, the final pixel color is the composite of many different light transport phenomena, and this conflicting information causes artifacts in image-based methods. Secondly, motion vectors are needed to establish correspondence between the pixels in different frames, but it is unclear how to obtain them for most kinds of light paths (e.g. an object seen through a curved glass panel). To reduce these ambiguities, we propose a general decomposition framework, where the final pixel color is separated into components corresponding to disjoint subsets of the space of light paths. Each component is accompanied by motion vectors and other auxiliary features such as reflectance and surface normals. The motion vectors of specular paths are computed using a temporal extension of manifold exploration and the remaining components use a specialized variant of optical flow. Our experiments show that this decomposition leads to significant improvements in three image-based applications: denoising, spatial upsampling, and temporal interpolation.
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    Goal-based Caustics
    (The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2011) Papas, Marios; Jarosz, Wojciech; Jakob, Wenzel; Rusinkiewicz, Szymon; Matusik, Wojciech; Weyrich, Tim; M. Chen and O. Deussen
    We propose a novel system for designing and manufacturing surfaces that produce desired caustic images when illuminated by a light source. Our system is based on a nonnegative image decomposition using a set of possibly overlapping anisotropic Gaussian kernels. We utilize this decomposition to construct an array of continuous surface patches, each of which focuses light onto one of the Gaussian kernels, either through refraction or reflection. We show how to derive the shape of each continuous patch and arrange them by performing a discrete assignment of patches to kernels in the desired caustic. Our decomposition provides for high fidelity reconstruction of natural images using a small collection of patches. We demonstrate our approach on a wide variety of caustic images by manufacturing physical surfaces with a small number of patches.
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    Recent Advances in Facial Appearance Capture
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2015) Klehm, Oliver; Rousselle, Fabrice; Papas, Marios; Bradley, Derek; Hery, Christophe; Bickel, Bernd; Jarosz, Wojciech; Beeler, Thabo; K. Hormann and O. Staadt
    Facial appearance capture is now firmly established within academic research and used extensively across various application domains, perhaps most prominently in the entertainment industry through the design of virtual characters in video games and films. While significant progress has occurred over the last two decades, no single survey currently exists that discusses the similarities, differences, and practical considerations of the available appearance capture techniques as applied to human faces. A central difficulty of facial appearance capture is the way light interacts with skin-which has a complex multi-layered structure-and the interactions that occur below the skin surface can, by definition, only be observed indirectly. In this report, we distinguish between two broad strategies for dealing with this complexity. “Image-based methods” try to exhaustively capture the exact face appearance under different lighting and viewing conditions, and then render the face through weighted image combinations. “Parametric methods” instead fit the captured reflectance data to some parametric appearance model used during rendering, allowing for a more lightweight and flexible representation but at the cost of potentially increased rendering complexity or inexact reproduction. The goal of this report is to provide an overview that can guide practitioners and researchers in assessing the tradeoffs between current approaches and identifying directions for future advances in facial appearance capture.
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    Progressive Expectation-Maximization for Hierarchical Volumetric Photon Mapping
    (The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2011) Jakob, Wenzel; Regg, Christian; Jarosz, Wojciech; Ravi Ramamoorthi and Erik Reinhard
    State-of-the-art density estimation methods for rendering participating media rely on a dense photon representation of the radiance distribution within a scene. A critical bottleneck of such kernel-based approaches is the excessive number of photons that are required in practice to resolve fine illumination details, while controlling the amount of noise. In this paper, we propose a parametric density estimation technique that represents radiance using a hierarchical Gaussian mixture. We efficiently obtain the coefficients of this mixture using a progressive and accelerated form of the Expectation Maximization algorithm. After this step, we are able to create noise-free renderings of high-frequency illumination using only a few thousand Gaussian terms, where millions of photons are traditionally required. Temporal coherence is trivially supported within this framework, and the compact footprint is also useful in the context of real-time visualization. We demonstrate a hierarchical ray tracing-based implementation, as well as a fast splatting approach that can interactively render animated volume caustics.
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    An Efficient Denoising Algorithm for Global Illumination
    (ACM, 2017) Mara, Michael; McGuire, Morgan; Bitterli, Benedikt; Jarosz, Wojciech; Vlastimil Havran and Karthik Vaiyanathan
    We propose a hybrid ray-tracing/rasterization strategy for real- time rendering enabled by a fast new denoising method. We factor global illumination into direct light at rasterized primary surfaces and two indirect lighting terms, each estimated with one path- traced sample per pixel. Our factorization enables efficient (biased) reconstruction by denoising light without blurring materials. We demonstrate denoising in under 10 ms per 1280 × 720 frame, compare results against the leading offline denoising methods, and include a supplement with source code, video, and data.
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    Manufacturing Layered Attenuators for Multiple Prescribed Shadow Images
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2012) Baran, Ilya; Keller, Philipp; Bradley, Derek; Coros, Stelian; Jarosz, Wojciech; Nowrouzezahrai, Derek; Gross, Markus; P. Cignoni and T. Ertl
    We present a practical and inexpensive method for creating physical objects that cast different color shadow images when illuminated by prescribed lighting configurations. The input to our system is a number of lighting configurations and corresponding desired shadow images. Our approach computes attenuation masks, which are then printed on transparent materials and stacked to form a single multi-layer attenuator. When illuminated with the input lighting configurations, this multi-layer attenuator casts the prescribed color shadow images. Alternatively, our method can compute layers so that their permutations produce different prescribed shadow images under fixed lighting. Each multi-layer attenuator is quick and inexpensive to produce, can generate multiple full-color shadows, and can be designed to respond to different types of natural or synthetic lighting setups. We illustrate the effectiveness of our multi-layer attenuators in simulation and in reality, with the sun as a light source.
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    2017 Cover Image: Mixing Bowl
    (© 2017 The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2017) Marra, Alessia; Nitti, Maurizio; Papas, Marios; Müller, Thomas; Gross, Markus; Jarosz, Wojciech; ovák, Jan; Chen, Min and Zhang, Hao (Richard)
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    Dispersion-based Color Projection using Masked Prisms
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2015) Hostettler, Rafael; Habel, Ralf; Gross, Markus; Jarosz, Wojciech; Stam, Jos and Mitra, Niloy J. and Xu, Kun
    We present a method for projecting arbitrary color images using a white light source and an optical device with no colored components - consisting solely of one or two prisms and two transparent masks. When illuminated, the first mask creates structured white light that is then dispersed in the prism and attenuated by the second mask to create the color projection. We derive analytical expressions for the mask parameters from the physical components and validate our approach both in simulation and also demonstrate it on a wide variety of images using two different physical setups (one consisting of two inexpensive triangular prisms, and the other using a single rhombic prism). Furthermore, we show that optimizing the masks simultaneously enables obfuscating the image content, and provides a tradeoff between increased light throughput (by up to a factor of three) and maximum color saturation.