Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 12
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    Skeleton-based Variational Mesh Deformations
    (The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2007) Yoshizawa, Shin; Belyaev, Alexander; Seidel, Hans-Peter
    In this paper, a new free-form shape deformation approach is proposed. We combine a skeleton-based mesh deformation technique with discrete differential coordinates in order to create natural-looking global shape deformations. Given a triangle mesh, we first extract a skeletal mesh, a two-sided Voronoibased approximation of the medial axis. Next the skeletal mesh is modified by free-form deformations. Then a desired global shape deformation is obtained by reconstructing the shape corresponding to the deformed skeletal mesh. The reconstruction is based on using discrete differential coordinates. Our method preserves fine geometric details and original shape thickness because of using discrete differential coordinates and skeleton-based deformations. We also develop a new mesh evolution technique which allow us to eliminate possible global and local self-intersections of the deformed mesh while preserving fine geometric details. Finally, we present a multi-resolution version of our approach in order to simplify and accelerate the deformation process. In addition, interesting links between the proposed free-form shape deformation technique and classical and modern results in the differential geometry of sphere congruences are established and discussed.
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    Contrast Restoration by Adaptive Countershading
    (The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2007) Krawczyk, Grzegorz; Myszkowski, Karol; Seidel, Hans-Peter
    The ABSTRACT is to be in fully-justified italicized text, between two horizontal lines, in one-column format, below the author and affiliation information. Use the word Abstract as the title, in 9-point Times, boldface type, left-aligned to the text, initially capitalized. The abstract is to be in 9-point, single-spaced type. The abstract may be up to 3 inches (7.62 cm) long. Leave one blank line after the abstract, then add the subject categories according to the ACM Classification Index (see http://www.acm.org/class/1998/).
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    Layered Performance Animation with Correlation Maps
    (The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2007) Neff, Michael; Albrecht, Irene; Seidel, Hans-Peter
    Performance has a spontaneity and aliveness that can be difficult to capture in more methodical animation processes such as keyframing. Access to performance animation has traditionally been limited to either low degree of freedom characters or required expensive hardware. We present a performance-based animation system for humanoid characters that requires no special hardware, relying only on mouse and keyboard input. We deal with the problem of controlling such a high degree of freedom model with low degree of freedom input through the use of correlation maps which employ 2D mouse input to modify a set of expressively relevant character parameters. Control can be continuously varied by rapidly switching between these maps. We present flexible techniques for varying and combining these maps and a simple process for defining them. The tool is highly configurable, presenting suitable defaults for novices and supporting a high degree of customization and control for experts. Animation can be recorded on a single pass, or multiple layers can be used to increase detail. Results from a user study indicate that novices are able to produce reasonable animations within their first hour of using the system. We also show more complicated results for walking and a standing character that gestures and dances.
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    Elastic Secondary Deformations by Vector Field Integration
    (The Eurographics Association, 2007) Funck, Wolfram von; Theisel, Holger; Seidel, Hans-Peter; Alexander Belyaev and Michael Garland
    We present an approach for elastic secondary deformations of shapes described as triangular meshes. The deformations are steered by the simulation of a low number of simple mass-spring sets. The result of this simulation is used to define time-dependent divergence-free vector fields whose numerical path line integration gives the new location of each vertex. This way the deformation is guaranteed to be volume-preserving and without self-intersections, giving plausible elastic deformations. Due to a GPU implementation, the deformation can be obtained in real-time for fairly complex shapes. The approach also avoids unwanted intersections in the case of collisions in the primary animation. We demonstrate its accuracy, stableness and usefulness for different kinds of primary animations/deformations.
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    Stackless KD-Tree Traversal for High Performance GPU Ray Tracing
    (The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2007) Popov, Stefan; Guenther, Johannes; Seidel, Hans-Peter; Slusallek, Philipp
    Significant advances have been achieved for realtime ray tracing recently, but realtime performance for complex scenes still requires large computational resources not yet available from the CPUs in standard PCs. Incidentally, most of these PCs also contain modern GPUs that do offer much larger raw compute power. However, limitations in the programming and memory model have so far kept the performance of GPU ray tracers well below that of their CPU counterparts.In this paper we present a novel packet ray traversal implementation that completely eliminates the need for maintaining a stack during kd-tree traversal and that reduces the number of traversal steps per ray. While CPUs benefit moderately from the stackless approach, it improves GPU performance significantly. We achieve a peak performance of over 16 million rays per second for reasonably complex scenes, including complex shading and secondary rays. Several examples show that with this new technique GPUs can actually outperform equivalent CPU based ray tracers.
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    Superresolution Reflectance Fields: Synthesizing images for intermediate light directions
    (The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2007) Fuchs, Martin; Lensch, Hendrik P. A.; Blanz, Volker; Seidel, Hans-Peter
    Captured reflectance fields tend to provide a relatively coarse sampling of the incident light directions. As a result, sharp illumination features, such as highlights or shadow boundaries, are poorly reconstructed during relighting; highlights are disconnected, and shadows show banding artefacts. In this paper, we propose a novel interpolation technique for 4D reflectance fields that reconstructs plausible images even for non-observed light directions. Given a sparsely sampled reflectance field, we can effectively synthesize images as they would have been obtained from denser sampling. The processing pipeline consists of three steps: (1) segmentation of regions where intermediate lighting cannot be obtained by blending, (2) appropriate flow algorithms for highlights and shadows, plus (3) a final reconstruction technique that uses image-based priors to faithfully correct errors that might be introduced by the segmentation or flow step. The algorithm reliably reproduces scenes that contain specular highlights, interreflections, shadows or caustics.
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    3D Reconstruction of Emission and Absorption in Planetary Nebulae
    (The Eurographics Association, 2007) Lintu, Andrei; Lensch, Hendrik P. A.; Magnor, Marcus; El-Abed, Sascha; Seidel, Hans-Peter; H.-C. Hege and R. Machiraju and T. Moeller and M. Sramek
    This paper addresses the problem of reconstructing the 3D structure of planetary nebulae from 2D observations. Assuming axial symmetry, our method jointly reconstructs the distribution of dust and ionized gas in the nebulae from observations at two different wavelengths. In an inverse rendering framework we optimize for the emission and absorption densities which are correlated to the gas and dust distribution present in the nebulae. First, the density distribution of the dust component is estimated based on an infrared image, which traces only the dust distribution due to its intrinsic temperature. In a second step, we optimize for the gas distribution by comparing the rendering of the nebula to the visible wavelength image. During this step, besides the emission of the ionized gas, we further include the effect of absorption and scattering due to the already estimated dust distribution. Using the same approach, we can as well start with a radio image from which the gas distribution is derived without absorption, then deriving the dust distribution from the visible wavelength image considering absorption and scattering. The intermediate steps and the final reconstruction results are visualized at real-time frame rates using a volume renderer. Using our method we recover both gas and dust density distributions present in the nebula by exploiting the distinct absorption or emission parameters at different wavelengths.
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    Linear Angle Based Parameterization
    (The Eurographics Association, 2007) Zayer, Rhaleb; Levy, Bruno; Seidel, Hans-Peter; Alexander Belyaev and Michael Garland
    In the field of mesh parameterization, the impact of angular and boundary distortion on parameterization quality have brought forward the need for robust and efficient free boundary angle preserving methods. One of the most prominent approaches in this direction is the Angle Based Flattening (ABF) which directly formulates the problem as a constrained nonlinear optimization in terms of angles. Since the original formulation of the ABF, a steady research effort has been dedicated to improving its efficiency. As for any well posed numerical problem, the solution is generally an approximation of the underlying mathematical equations. The economy and accuracy of the solution are to a great extent affected by the kind of approximation used. In this work we reformulate the problem based on the notion of error of estimation. A careful manipulation of the resulting equations yields for the first time a linear version of angle based parameterization. The error induced by this linearization is quadratic in terms of the error in angles and the validity of the approximation is further supported by numerical results. Besides performance speedup, the simplicity of the current setup makes re-implementation and reproduction of our results straightforward.
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    Global Illumination using Photon Ray Splatting
    (The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2007) Herzog, Robert; Havran, Vlastimil; Kinuwaki, Shinichi; Myszkowski, Karol; Seidel, Hans-Peter
    We present a novel framework for efficiently computing the indirect illumination in diffuse and moderately glossy scenes using density estimation techniques. Many existing global illumination approaches either quickly compute an overly approximate solution or perform an orders of magnitude slower computation to obtain high-quality results for the indirect illumination. The proposed method improves photon density estimation and leads to significantly better visual quality in particular for complex geometry, while only slightly increasing the computation time. We perform direct splatting of photon rays, which allows us to use simpler search data structures. Since our density estimation is carried out in ray space rather than on surfaces, as in the commonly used photon mapping algorithm, the results are more robust against geometrically incurred sources of bias. This holds also in combination with final gathering where photon mapping often overestimates the illumination near concave geometric features. In addition, we show that our photon splatting technique can be extended to handle moderately glossy surfaces and can be combined with traditional irradiance caching for sparse sampling and filtering in image space.
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    Segmentation of DT-MRI Anisotropy Isosurfaces
    (The Eurographics Association, 2007) Schultz, Thomas; Theisel, Holger; Seidel, Hans-Peter; K. Museth and T. Moeller and A. Ynnerman
    While isosurfaces of anisotropy measures for data from diffusion tensor magnetic resonance imaging (DT-MRI) are known to depict major anatomical structures, the anisotropy metric reduces the rich tensor data to a simple scalar field. In this work, we suggest that the part of the data which has been ignored by the metric can be used to segment anisotropy isosurfaces into anatomically meaningful regions. For the implementation, we propose an edge-based watershed method that adapts and extends a method from curvature-based mesh segmentation [MW99]. Finally, we use the segmentation results to enhance visualization of the data.