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Now showing 1 - 10 of 17
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    Geometry and Attribute Compression for Voxel Scenes
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Dado, Bas; Kol, Timothy R.; Bauszat, Pablo; Thiery, Jean-Marc; Eisemann, Elmar; Joaquim Jorge and Ming Lin
    Voxel-based approaches are today's standard to encode volume data. Recently, directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) were successfully used for compressing sparse voxel scenes as well, but they are restricted to a single bit of (geometry) information per voxel. We present a method to compress arbitrary data, such as colors, normals, or reflectance information. By decoupling geometry and voxel data via a novel mapping scheme, we are able to apply the DAG principle to encode the topology, while using a palette-based compression for the voxel attributes, leading to a drastic memory reduction. Our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art techniques and is well-suited for GPU architectures. We achieve real-time performance on commodity hardware for colored scenes with up to 17 hierarchical levels (a 128K3 voxel resolution), which are stored fully in core.
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    Compressed Multiresolution Hierarchies for High-Quality Precomputed Shadows
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Scandolo, Leonardo; Bauszat, Pablo; Eisemann, Elmar; Joaquim Jorge and Ming Lin
    The quality of shadow mapping is traditionally limited by texture resolution. We present a novel lossless compression scheme for high-resolution shadow maps based on precomputed multiresolution hierarchies. Traditional multiresolution trees can compactly represent homogeneous regions of shadow maps at coarser levels, but require many nodes for fine details. By conservatively adapting the depth map, we can significantly reduce the tree complexity. Our proposed method offers high compression rates, avoids quantization errors, exploits coherency along all data dimensions, and is well-suited for GPU architectures. Our approach can be applied for coherent shadow maps as well, enabling several applications, including high-quality soft shadows and dynamic lights moving on fixed-trajectories.
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    Perception-driven Accelerated Rendering
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2017) Weier, Martin; Stengel, Michael; Roth, Thorsten; Didyk, Piotr; Eisemann, Elmar; Eisemann, Martin; Grogorick, Steve; Hinkenjann, André; Kruijff, Ernst; Magnor, Marcus; Myszkowski, Karol; Slusallek, Philipp; Victor Ostromoukov and Matthias Zwicker
    Advances in computer graphics enable us to create digital images of astonishing complexity and realism. However, processing resources are still a limiting factor. Hence, many costly but desirable aspects of realism are often not accounted for, including global illumination, accurate depth of field and motion blur, spectral effects, etc. especially in real-time rendering. At the same time, there is a strong trend towards more pixels per display due to larger displays, higher pixel densities or larger fields of view. Further observable trends in current display technology include more bits per pixel (high dynamic range, wider color gamut/fidelity), increasing refresh rates (better motion depiction), and an increasing number of displayed views per pixel (stereo, multi-view, all the way to holographic or lightfield displays). These developments cause significant unsolved technical challenges due to aspects such as limited compute power and bandwidth. Fortunately, the human visual system has certain limitations, which mean that providing the highest possible visual quality is not always necessary. In this report, we present the key research and models that exploit the limitations of perception to tackle visual quality and workload alike. Moreover, we present the open problems and promising future research targeting the question of how we can minimize the effort to compute and display only the necessary pixels while still offering a user full visual experience.
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    Voxel DAGs and Multiresolution Hierarchies: From Large-Scale Scenes to Pre-computed Shadows
    (The Eurographics Association, 2018) Assarsson, Ulf; Billeter, Markus; Dolonius, Dan; Eisemann, Elmar; Jaspe, Alberto; Scandolo, Leonardo; Sintorn, Erik; Ritschel, Tobias and Telea, Alexandru
    In this tutorial, we discuss voxel DAGs and multiresolution hierarchies, which are representations that can encode large volumes of data very efficiently. Despite a significant compression ration, an advantage of these structures is that their content can be efficiently accessed in real-time. This property enables various applications. We begin the tutorial by introducing the concepts of sparsity and of coherency in voxel structures, and explain how a directed acyclic graph (DAG) can be used to represent voxel geometry in a form that exploits both aspects, while remaining usable in its compressed from for e.g. ray casting. In this context, we also discuss extensions that cover the time domain or consider an advanced encoding strategies exploiting symmetries and entropy. We then move on to voxel attributes, such as colors, and explain how to integrate such information with the voxel DAGs. We will provide implementation details and present methods for efficiently constructing the DAGs and also cover how to efficiently access the data structures with e.g. GPU-based ray tracers. The course will be rounded of with a segment on applications. We highlight a few examples and show their results. Pre-computed shadows are a special application, which will be covered in detail. In this context, we also explain how some of previous ideas contribute to multi-resolution hierarchies, which gives an outlook on the potential generality of the presented solutions.
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    Mapping Images to Target Devices: Spatial, Temporal, Stereo, Tone, and Color
    (The Eurographics Association, 2012) Banterle, Francesco; Artusi, Alessandro; Aydin, Tunc O.; Didyk, Piotr; Eisemann, Elmar; Gutierrez, Diego; Mantiuk, Rafael; Myszkowski, Karol; Ritschel, Tobias; Renato Pajarola and Michela Spagnuolo
    Retargeting is a process through which an image or a video is adapted from the display device for which it was meant (target display) to another one (retarget display). The retarget display can have different features from the target one such as: dynamic range, discretization levels, color gamut, multi-view (3D), refresh rate, spatial resolution, etc. This tutorial presents the latest solutions and techniques for retargeting images along various dimensions (such as dynamic range, colors, temporal and spatial resolutions) and offers for the first time a much-needed holistic view of the field. This includes how to measure and analyze the changes applied to an image/video in terms of quality using both (subjective) psychophysical experiments and (objective) computational metrics.
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    The Online Anatomical Human: Web-based Anatomy Education
    (The Eurographics Association, 2016) Smit, Noeska; Hofstede, Cees-Willem; Kraima, Annelot; Jansma, Daniel; deRuiter, Marco; Eisemann, Elmar; Vilanova, Anna; Beatriz Sousa Santos and Jean-Michel Dischler
    The Online Anatomical Human (OAH) is a web-based viewer for studying anatomy. It is based on real human anatomy and incorporates medical image data in linked 2D and 3D views that students can freely interact with. Our application is the only to support 2D and 3D views based on real medical imaging data. The main goal of this anatomical online resource is to serve as an educational platform available to anyone with access to a modern web browser. Users can annotate regions, add comments, and provide hyperlinks to additional media. By making our work accessible to medical experts, we can ensure an increasing amount of information, leading to an evergrowing gain in educational value. The OAH will be used in an upcoming Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) to teach anatomy of the pelvis and will be made available to students worldwide via the web.
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    Cytosplore: Interactive Visual Single-Cell Profiling of the Immune System
    (The Eurographics Association, 2019) Höllt, Thomas; Pezzotti, Nicola; van Unen, Vincent; Li, Na; Koning, Frits; Eisemann, Elmar; Lelieveldt, Boudewijn P. F.; Vilanova, Anna; Bruckner, Stefan and Oeltze-Jafra, Steffen
    Recent advances in single-cell acquisition technology have led to a shift towards single-cell analysis in many fields of biology. In immunology, detailed knowledge of the cellular composition is of interest, as it can be the cause of deregulated immune responses, which cause diseases. Similarly, vaccination is based on triggering proper immune responses; however, many vaccines are ineffective or only work properly in a subset of those who are vaccinated. Identifying differences in the cellular composition of the immune system in such cases can lead to more precise treatment. Cytosplore is an integrated, interactive visual analysis framework for the exploration of large single-cell datasets. We have developed Cytosplore in close collaboration with immunology researchers and several partners use the software in their daily workflow. Cytosplore enables efficient data analysis and has led to several discoveries alongside high-impact publications.
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    General and Robust Error Estimation and Reconstruction for Monte Carlo Rendering
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2015) Bauszat, Pablo; Eisemann, Martin; Eisemann, Elmar; Magnor, Marcus; Olga Sorkine-Hornung and Michael Wimmer
    Adaptive filtering techniques have proven successful in handling non-uniform noise in Monte-Carlo rendering approaches. A recent trend is to choose an optimal filter per pixel from a selection of non spatially-varying filters. Nonetheless, the best filter choice is difficult to predict in the absence of a reference rendering. Our approach relies on the observation that the reconstruction error is locally smooth for a given filter. Hence, we propose to construct a dense error prediction from a small set of sparse but robust estimates. The filter selection is then formulated as a non-local optimization problem, which we solve via graph cuts, to avoid visual artifacts due to inconsistent filter choices. Our approach does not impose any restrictions on the used filters, outperforms previous state-of-the-art techniques and provides an extensible framework for future reconstruction techniques.
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    Scalable Remote Rendering with Depth and Motion-flow Augmented Streaming
    (The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2011) Paja, Dawid; Herzog, Robert; Eisemann, Elmar; Myszkowski, Karol; Seidel, Hans-Peter; M. Chen and O. Deussen
    In this paper, we focus on efficient compression and streaming of frames rendered from a dynamic 3D model. Remote rendering and on-the-fly streaming become increasingly attractive for interactive applications. Data is kept confidential and only images are sent to the client. Even if the client's hardware resources are modest, the user can interact with state-of-the-art rendering applications executed on the server. Our solution focuses on augmented video information, e.g., by depth, which is key to increase robustness with respect to data loss, image reconstruction, and is an important feature for stereo vision and other client-side applications. Two major challenges arise in such a setup. First, the server workload has to be controlled to support many clients, second the data transfer needs to be efficient. Consequently, our contributions are twofold. First, we reduce the server-based computations by making use of sparse sampling and temporal consistency to avoid expensive pixel evaluations. Second, our data-transfer solution takes limited bandwidths into account, is robust to information loss, and compression and decompression are efficient enough to support real-time interaction. Our key insight is to tailor our method explicitly for rendered 3D content and shift some computations on client GPUs, to better balance the server/client workload. Our framework is progressive, scalable, and allows us to stream augmented high-resolution (e.g., HDready) frames with small bandwidth on standard hardware.
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    A Survey on Temporal Coherence Methods in Real-Time Rendering
    (The Eurographics Association, 2011) Scherzer, Daniel; Yang, Lei; Mattausch, Oliver; Nehab, Diego; Sander, Pedro V.; Wimmer, Michael; Eisemann, Elmar; N. John and B. Wyvill
    Nowadays, there is a strong trend towards rendering to higher-resolution displays and at high frame rates. This development aims at delivering more detail and better accuracy, but it also comes at a significant cost. Although graphics cards continue to evolve with an ever-increasing amount of computational power, the processing gain is counteracted to a high degree by increasingly complex and sophisticated pixel computations. For real-time applications, the direct consequence is that image resolution and temporal resolution are often the first candidates to bow to the performance constraints (e.g., although full HD is possible, PS3 and XBox often render at lower resolutions). In order to achieve high-quality rendering at a lower cost, one can exploit temporal coherence (TC). The underlying observation is that a higher resolution and frame rate do not necessarily imply a much higher workload, but a larger amount of redundancy and a higher potential for amortizing rendering over several frames. In this state-of-the-art report, we investigate methods that make use of this principle and provide practical and theoretical advice on how to exploit temporal coherence for performance optimization. These methods not only allow incorporating more computationally intensive shading effects into many existing applications, but also offer exciting opportunities for extending high-end graphics applications to lower-spec consumer-level hardware. To this end, we first introduce the notion and main concepts of TC, including an overview of historical methods. We then describe a key data structure, the so-called reprojection cache, with several supporting algorithms that facilitate reusing shading information from previous frames, and finally illustrated its usefulness in various applications.