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Item Modeling a Generic Tone-mapping Operator(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2008) Mantiuk, Rafal; Seidel, Hans-PeterAlthough several new tone-mapping operators are proposed each year, there is no reliable method to validate their performance or to tell how different they are from one another. In order to analyze and understand the behavior of tone-mapping operators, we model their mechanisms by fitting a generic operator to an HDR image and its tone-mapped LDR rendering. We demonstrate that the majority of both global and local tone-mapping operators can be well approximated by computationally inexpensive image processing operations, such as a per-pixel tone curve, a modulation transfer function and color saturation adjustment. The results produced by such a generic tone-mapping algorithm are often visually indistinguishable from much more expensive algorithms, such as the bilateral filter. We show the usefulness of our generic tone-mapper in backward-compatible HDR image compression, the black-box analysis of existing tone mapping algorithms and the synthesis of new algorithms that are combination of existing operators.Item Animating Pictures of Fluid using Video Examples(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2009) Okabe, Makoto; Anjyo, Ken; Igarashi, Takeo; Seidel, Hans-PeterWe propose a system that allows the user to design a continuous flow animation starting from a still fluid image. The basic idea is to apply the fluid motion extracted from a video example to the target image. The system first decomposes the video example into three components, an average image, a flow field and residuals. The user then specifies equivalent information over the target image. The user manually paints the rough flow field, and the system automatically refines it using the estimated gradients of the target image. The user semi-automatically transfers the residuals onto the target image. The system then approximates the average image and synthesizes an animation on the target image by adding the transferred residuals and warping them according to the user-specified flow field. Finally, the system adjusts the appearance of the resulting animation by applying histogram matching. We designed animations of various pictures, such as rivers, waterfalls, fires, and smoke.Item Higher Order Barycentric Coordinates(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2008) Langer, Torsten; Seidel, Hans-PeterIn recent years, a wide range of generalized barycentric coordinates has been suggested. However, all of them lack control over derivatives. We show how the notion of barycentric coordinates can be extended to specify derivatives at control points. This is also known as Hermite interpolation. We introduce a method to modify existing barycentric coordinates to higher order barycentric coordinates and demonstrate, using higher order mean value coordinates, that our method, although conceptually simple and easy to implement, can be used to give easy and intuitive control at interactive frame rates over local space deformations such as rotations.Item Automatic Conversion of Mesh Animations into Skeleton-based Animations(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2008) De Aguiar, Edilson; Theobalt, Christian; Thrun, Sebastian; Seidel, Hans-PeterRecently, it has become increasingly popular to represent animations not by means of a classical skeleton-based model, but in the form of deforming mesh sequences. The reason for this new trend is that novel mesh deformation methods as well as new surface based scene capture techniques offer a great level of flexibility during animation creation. Unfortunately, the resulting scene representation is less compact than skeletal ones and there is not yet a rich toolbox available which enables easy post-processing and modification of mesh animations. To bridge this gap between the mesh-based and the skeletal paradigm, we propose a new method that automatically extracts a plausible kinematic skeleton, skeletal motion parameters, as well as surface skinning weights from arbitrary mesh animations. By this means, deforming mesh sequences can be fully-automatically transformed into fullyrigged virtual subjects. The original input can then be quickly rendered based on the new compact bone and skin representation, and it can be easily modified using the full repertoire of already existing animation tools.Item Render2MPEG: A Perception-based Framework Towards Integrating Rendering and Video Compression(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2008) Herzog, Robert; Kinuwaki, Shinichi; Myszkowski, Karol; Seidel, Hans-PeterCurrently 3D animation rendering and video compression are completely independent processes even if rendered frames are streamed on-the-fly within a client-server platform. In such scenario, which may involve time-varying transmission bandwidths and different display characteristics at the client side, dynamic adjustment of the rendering quality to such requirements can lead to a better use of server resources. In this work, we present a framework where the renderer and MPEG codec are coupled through a straightforward interface that provides precise motion vectors from the rendering side to the codec and perceptual error thresholds for each pixel in the opposite direction. The perceptual error thresholds take into account bandwidth-dependent quantization errors resulting from the lossy com-pression as well as image content-dependent luminance and spatial contrast masking. The availability of the discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficients at the codec side enables to use advanced models of the human visual system (HVS) in the perceptual error threshold derivation without incurring any significant cost. Those error thresholds are then used to control the rendering quality and make it well aligned with the compressed stream quality. In our prototype system we use the lightcuts technique developed by Walter et al., which we enhance to handle dynamic image sequences, and an MPEG-2 implementation. Our results clearly demonstrate many advantages of coupling the rendering with video compression in terms of faster rendering. Furthermore, temporally coherent rendering leads to a reduction of temporal artifacts.Item Anisotropic Radiance-Cache Splatting for Efficiently Computing High-Quality Global Illumination with Lightcuts(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2009) Herzog, Robert; Myszkowski, Karol; Seidel, Hans-PeterComputing global illumination in complex scenes is even with todays computational power a demanding task. In this work we propose a novel irradiance caching scheme that combines the advantages of two state-of-the-art algorithms for high-quality global illumination rendering: lightcuts, an adaptive and hierarchical instant-radiosity based algorithm and the widely used (ir)radiance caching algorithm for sparse sampling and interpolation of (ir)radiance in object space. Our adaptive radiance caching algorithm is based on anisotropic cache splatting, which adapts the cache footprints not only to the magnitude of the illumination gradient computed with light-cuts but also to its orientation allowing larger interpolation errors along the direction of coherent illumination while reducing the error along the illumination gradient. Since lightcuts computes the direct and indirect lighting seamlessly, we use a two-layer radiance cache, to store and control the interpolation of direct and indirect lighting individually with different error criteria. In multiple iterations our method detects cache interpolation errors above the visibility threshold of a pixel and reduces the anisotropic cache footprints accordingly. We achieve significantly better image quality while also speeding up the computation costs by one to two orders of magnitude with respect to the well-known photon mapping with (ir)radiance caching procedure.Item Predicting Display Visibility Under Dynamically Changing Lighting Conditions(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2009) Aydin, Tunc Ozan; Myszkowski, Karol; Seidel, Hans-PeterDisplay devices, more than ever, are finding their ways into electronic consumer goods as a result of recent trends in providing more functionality and user interaction. Combined with the new developments in display technology towards higher reproducible luminance range, the mobility and variation in capability of display devices are constantly increasing. Consequently, in real life usage it is now very likely that the display emission to be distorted by spatially and temporally varying reflections, and the observer s visual system to be not adapted to the particular display that she is viewing at that moment. The actual perception of the display content cannot be fully understood by only considering steady-state illumination and adaptation conditions. We propose an objective method for display visibility analysis formulating the problem as a full-reference image quality assessment problem, where the display emission under ideal conditions is used as the reference for real-life conditions. Our work includes a human visual system model that accounts for maladaptation and temporal recovery of sensitivity. As an example application we integrate our method to a global illumination simulator and analyze the visibility of a car interior display under realistic lighting conditions.Item Goniometric Diagram Mapping for Hemisphere(Eurographics Association, 2003) Havran, Vlastimil; Dmitriev, Kirill; Seidel, Hans-PeterDescribing the light intensity over the hemisphere using a goniometric diagram is a common practice in the lighting industry and is prescribed for instance by IESNA (Illuminating Engineering Society of North America) standards. Goniometric diagram specifies the spatial distribution of the emitted power via a hemispherical surface subdivided by meridians and parallels. Similar tabulated representations are extensively used for complex bidirectional refiectance distribution functions (BRDF) that are difficult to approximate with analytical models. We present an approximative bicontinuous mapping from the unit square to a goniometric diagram on the hemisphere. This mapping has low distortion and the error of the approximation is low. The proposed mapping algorithm is obtained as a composition of four mappings. We outline its use for importance sampling of light sources described by goniometric diagrams and for the representation of BRDF.