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Now showing 1 - 10 of 894
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    Challenges in the Digitisation of a High-reflective Artwork
    (The Eurographics Association, 2021) Catalano, Chiara Eva; Brunetto, Erika; Mortara, Michela; Pizzi, Corrado; Hulusic, Vedad and Chalmers, Alan
    In this paper we report about the photogrammetric acquisition and reconstruction of a contemporary artwork, performed by offthe- shelf software. The ceramic piece of art is "Il Libro d'Oro del Terzo Paradiso" ("The Golden Book of the Third Paradise") by Michelangelo Pistoletto, accessed and studied in the framework of a regional project. This artefact is particularly challenging. On the one hand, it is golden coated and, as such, highly reflective. Hence, images are likely to suffer from highlight spots, shadows or self-reflections, and the reconstructed point cloud is typically noisy. On the other hand, the object exhibits simple geometry, mainly composed of planar surfaces, and is highly symmetric; however, it possesses detail features and undercuts. The symmetric nature of the object and reflections misled the image alignment, and the noise in the data turned out to be of the same scale as the detail features. We will discuss all the steps of the process, aimed at obtaining a high quality and accurate 3D model using low-cost tools.
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    Fast Updates for Least-Squares Rotational Alignment
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2021) Zhang, Jiayi Eris; Jacobson, Alec; Alexa, Marc; Mitra, Niloy and Viola, Ivan
    Across computer graphics, vision, robotics and simulation, many applications rely on determining the 3D rotation that aligns two objects or sets of points. The standard solution is to use singular value decomposition (SVD), where the optimal rotation is recovered as the product of the singular vectors. Faster computation of only the rotation is possible using suitable parameterizations of the rotations and iterative optimization. We propose such a method based on the Cayley transformations. The resulting optimization problem allows better local quadratic approximation compared to the Taylor approximation of the exponential map. This results in both faster convergence as well as more stable approximation compared to other iterative approaches. It also maps well to AVX vectorization. We compare our implementation with a wide range of alternatives on real and synthetic data. The results demonstrate up to two orders of magnitude of speedup compared to a straightforward SVD implementation and a 1.5-6 times speedup over popular optimized code.
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    Quad Layouts via Constrained T-Mesh Quantization
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2021) Lyon, Max; Campen, Marcel; Kobbelt, Leif; Mitra, Niloy and Viola, Ivan
    We present a robust and fast method for the creation of conforming quad layouts on surfaces. Our algorithm is based on the quantization of a T-mesh, i.e. an assignment of integer lengths to the sides of a non-conforming rectangular partition of the surface. This representation has the benefit of being able to encode an infinite number of layout connectivity options in a finite manner, which guarantees that a valid layout can always be found. We carefully construct the T-mesh from a given seamless parametrization such that the algorithm can provide guarantees on the results' quality. In particular, the user can specify a bound on the angular deviation of layout edges from prescribed directions. We solve an integer linear program (ILP) to find a coarse quad layout adhering to that maximal deviation. Our algorithm is guaranteed to yield a conforming quad layout free of T-junctions together with bounded angle distortion. Our results show that the presented method is fast, reliable, and achieves high quality layouts.
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    Algorithmic Improvements on Hilbert and Moore Treemaps for Visualization of Large Tree-structured Datasets
    (The Eurographics Association, 2021) Scheibel, Willy; Weyand, Christopher; Bethge, Joseph; Döllner, Jürgen; Agus, Marco and Garth, Christoph and Kerren, Andreas
    Hilbert and Moore treemaps are based on the same named space-filling curves to lay out tree-structured data for visualization. One main component of them is a partitioning subroutine, whose algorithmic complexity poses problems when scaling to industry-sized datasets. Further, the subroutine allows for different optimization criteria that result in different layout decisions. This paper proposes conceptual and algorithmic improvements to this partitioning subroutine. Two measures for the quality of partitioning are proposed, resulting in the min-max and min-variance optimization tasks. For both tasks, linear-time algorithms are presented that find an optimal solution. The implementation variants are evaluated with respect to layout metrics and run-time performance against a previously available greedy approach. The results show significantly improved run time and no deterioration in layout metrics, suggesting effective use of Hilbert and Moore treemaps for datasets with millions of nodes.
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    Stable and Efficient Differential Estimators on Oriented Point Clouds
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2021) Lejemble, Thibault; Coeurjolly, David; Barthe, Loïc; Mellado, Nicolas; Digne, Julie and Crane, Keenan
    Point clouds are now ubiquitous in computer graphics and computer vision. Differential properties of the point-sampled surface, such as principal curvatures, are important to estimate in order to locally characterize the scanned shape. To approximate the surface from unstructured points equipped with normal vectors, we rely on the Algebraic Point Set Surfaces (APSS) [GG07] for which we provide convergence and stability proofs for the mean curvature estimator. Using an integral invariant viewpoint, this first contribution links the algebraic sphere regression involved in the APSS algorithm to several surface derivatives of different orders. As a second contribution, we propose an analytic method to compute the shape operator and its principal curvatures from the fitted algebraic sphere. We compare our method to the state-of-the-art with several convergence and robustness tests performed on a synthetic sampled surface. Experiments show that our curvature estimations are more accurate and stable while being faster to compute compared to previous methods. Our differential estimators are easy to implement with little memory footprint and only require a unique range neighbors query per estimation. Its highly parallelizable nature makes it appropriate for processing large acquired data, as we show in several real-world experiments.
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    Virtual Dance Museum: the Case of Greek/Cypriot Folk Dancing
    (The Eurographics Association, 2021) Aristidou, Andreas; Andreou, Nefeli; Charalambous, Loukas; Yiannakidis, Anastasios; Chrysanthou, Yiorgos; Hulusic, Vedad and Chalmers, Alan
    In this paper, we have designed and developed a virtual dance museum to provide the technological tools that allow for widely educating the public, most specifically the youngest generations, about the story, costumes, music, and history of our dances. The holistic documentation of our intangible cultural heritage creations is a critical necessity for the preservation and the continuity of our identity as Europeans. In that direction, we have employed a specially designed relational database schema that holistically structures the information within the database, and is ideal for archiving, presenting, further analyzing, and re-using dance motion data. Data have been retargeted to a virtual character, dressed with traditional uniform and simulated to achieve realism. The users can view and interact with the archived data using advanced 3D character visualization in three ways: via an online 3D virtual environment; in virtual reality using headset; and in augmented reality, where the 3D characters can co-inhabit the real world. Our museum is publicly accessible, and also enables motion data reusability, facilitating dance learning applications through gamification.
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    UnityPIC: Unity Point-Cloud Interactive Core
    (The Eurographics Association, 2021) Wu, Yaocheng; Vo, Huy; Gong, Jie; Zhu, Zhigang; Larsen, Matthew and Sadlo, Filip
    In this work, we present Unity Point-Cloud Interactive Core, a novel interactive point cloud rendering pipeline for the Unity Development Platform. The goal of the proposed pipeline is to expedite the development process for point cloud applications by encapsulating the rendering process as a standalone component, while maintaining flexibility through an implementable interface. The proposed pipeline allows for rendering arbitrarily large point clouds with improved performance and visual quality. First, a novel dynamic batching scheme is proposed to address the adaptive point sizing problem for level-of-detail (LOD) point cloud structures. Then, an approximate rendering algorithm is proposed to reduce overdraw by minimizing the overall number of fragment operations through an intermediate occlusion culling pass. For the purpose of analysis, the visual quality of renderings is quantified and measured by comparing against a high-quality baseline. In the experiments, the proposed pipeline maintains above 90 FPS for a 20 million point budget while achieving greater than 90% visual quality during interaction when rendering a point-cloud with more than 20 billion points.
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    From Noon to Sunset: Interactive Rendering, Relighting, and Recolouring of Landscape Photographs by Modifying Solar Position
    (© 2021 Eurographics ‐ The European Association for Computer Graphics and John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2021) Türe, Murat; Çıklabakkal, Mustafa Ege; Erdem, Aykut; Erdem, Erkut; Satılmış, Pinar; Akyüz, Ahmet Oguz; Benes, Bedrich and Hauser, Helwig
    Image editing is a commonly studied problem in computer graphics. Despite the presence of many advanced editing tools, there is no satisfactory solution to controllably update the position of the sun using a single image. This problem is made complicated by the presence of clouds, complex landscapes, and the atmospheric effects that must be accounted for. In this paper, we tackle this problem starting with only a single photograph. With the user clicking on the initial position of the sun, our algorithm performs several estimation and segmentation processes for finding the horizon, scene depth, clouds, and the sky line. After this initial process, the user can make both fine‐ and large‐scale changes on the position of the sun: it can be set beneath the mountains or moved behind the clouds practically turning a midday photograph into a sunset (or vice versa). We leverage a precomputed atmospheric scattering algorithm to make all of these changes not only realistic but also in real‐time. We demonstrate our results using both clear and cloudy skies, showing how to add, remove, and relight clouds, all the while allowing for advanced effects such as scattering, shadows, light shafts, and lens flares.
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    Recreational Motion Simulation: A New Frontier for Virtual Worlds Research
    (The Eurographics Association, 2021) Williams, Benjamin; Headleand, Christopher J.; Xu, Kai and Turner, Martin
    Motion simulation is a developing field which continues to grow with the recent incline in commercial virtual reality. Whilst the majority of motion simulation research focuses on flight simulation and training, its utility in recreational settings is often overlooked. Despite this lack of research, the use of motion simulators for recreational purposes spans decades, and is still today one of the most popular applications of motion simulator devices. Furthermore, with the recent development of low-cost motion simulation platforms, consumers have begun to use these devices in the home. Research regarding motion simulation and its effects in recreational experiences is needed now more than ever, and in this position paper we outline several reasons for its importance.
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    User-centred Depth Estimation Benchmarking for VR Content Creation from Single Images
    (The Eurographics Association, 2021) Dickson, Anthony; Knott, Alistair; Zollmann, Stefanie; Lee, Sung-Hee and Zollmann, Stefanie and Okabe, Makoto and Wünsche, Burkhard
    The capture and creation of 3D content from a device equipped with just a single RGB camera has a wide range of applications ranging from 3D photographs and panoramas to 3D video. Many of these methods rely on depth estimation models to provide the necessary 3D data, mainly neural network models. However, the metrics used to evaluate these models can be difficult to interpret and to relate to the quality of 3D/VR content derived from these models. In this work, we explore the relationship between the widely used depth estimation metrics, image similarly metrics applied to synthesised novel viewpoints, and user perception of quality and similarity on these novel viewpoints. Our results indicate that the standard metrics are indeed a good indicator of 3D quality, and that they correlate with human judgements and other metrics that are designed to follow human judgements.