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Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
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    High Dynamic Range Techniques in Graphics: from Acquisition to Display
    (The Eurographics Association, 2005) Goesele, Michael; Heidrich, Wolfgang; Höfflinger, Bernd; Krawczyk, Grzegorz; Myszkowski, Karol; Trentacoste, Matthew; Ming Lin and Celine Loscos
    This course is motivated by tremendous progress in the development and accessibility of high dynamic range technology (HDR) that happened just recently, which creates many interesting opportunities and challenges in graphics. The course presents a complete pipeline for HDR image and video processing from acquisition, through compression and quality evaluation, to display. Also, successful examples of the use of HDR technology in research setups and industrial applications are provided. Whenever needed relevant background information on human perception is given which enables better understanding of the design choices behind the discussed algorithms and HDR equipment.
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    High Dynamic Range Imaging and Low Dynamic Range Expansion for Generating HDR Content
    (The Eurographics Association, 2009) Banterle, Francesco; Debattista, Kurt; Artusi, Alessandro; Pattanaik, Sumanta; Myszkowski, Karol; Ledda, Patrick; Bloj, Marina; Chalmers, Alan; M. Pauly and G. Greiner
    In the last few years, researchers in the field of High Dynamic Range (HDR) Imaging have focused on providing tools for expanding Low Dynamic Range (LDR) content for the generation of HDR images due to the growing popularity of HDR in applications, such as photography and rendering via Image-Based Lighting, and the imminent arrival of HDR displays to the consumer market. LDR content expansion is required due to the lack of fast and reliable consumer level HDR capture for still images and videos. Furthermore, LDR content expansion, will allow the re-use of legacy LDR stills, videos and LDR applications created, over the last century and more, to be widely available. The use of certain LDR expansion methods, those that are based on the inversion of tone mapping operators, has made it possible to create novel compression algorithms that tackle the problem of the size of HDR content storage, which remains one of the major obstacles to be overcome for the adoption of HDR. These methods are used in conjunction with traditional LDR compression methods and can evolve accordingly. The goal of this report is to provide a comprehensive overview on HDR Imaging, and an in depth review on these emerging topics.
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    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-Peter
    Currently 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.
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    Global Illumination for Interactive Applications and High-Quality Animations
    (Eurographics Association, 2002) Damez, Cyrille; Dmitriev, Kirill; Myszkowski, Karol
    One of the main obstacles to the use of global illumination in image synthesis industry is the considerable amount of time needed to compute the lighting for a single image. Until now, this computational cost has prevented its widespread use in interactive design applications as well as in computer animations. Several algorithms have been proposed to address these issues. In this report, we present a much needed survey and classification of the most up-to-date of these methods. Roughly, two families of algorithms can be distinguished. The first one aims at providing interactive feedback for lighting design applications. The second one gives higher priority to the quality of results, and therefore relies on offline computations. Recently, impressive advances have been made in both categories. Indeed, with the steady progress of computing resources and graphics hardware, and the current trend of new algorithms for animated scenes, common use of global illumination seems closer than ever.
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    Apparent Greyscale: A Simple and Fast Conversion to Perceptually Accurate Images and Video
    (The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2008) Smith, Kaleigh; Landes, Pierre-Edouard; Thollot, Joelle; Myszkowski, Karol
    This paper presents a quick and simple method for converting complex images and video to perceptually accurate greyscale versions. We use a two-step approach first to globally assign grey values and determine colour ordering, then second, to locally enhance the greyscale to reproduce the original contrast. Our global mapping is image independent and incorporates the Helmholtz-Kohlrausch colour appearance effect for predicting differences between isoluminant colours. Our multiscale local contrast enhancement reintroduces lost discontinuities only in regions that insufficiently represent original chromatic contrast. All operations are restricted so that they preserve the overall image appearance, lightness range and differences, colour ordering, and spatial details, resulting in perceptually accurate achromatic reproductions of the colour original.
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    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-Peter
    Computing 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.
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    Predicting Display Visibility Under Dynamically Changing Lighting Conditions
    (The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2009) Aydin, Tunc Ozan; Myszkowski, Karol; Seidel, Hans-Peter
    Display 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.