Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 22
  • Item
    Recent Advances in Adaptive Sampling and Reconstruction for Monte Carlo Rendering
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2015) Zwicker, Matthias; Jarosz, Wojciech; Lehtinen, Jaakko; Moon, Bochang; Ramamoorthi, Ravi; Rousselle, Fabrice; Sen, Pradeep; Soler, Cyril; Yoon, Sungeui E.; K. Hormann and O. Staadt
    Monte Carlo integration is firmly established as the basis for most practical realistic image synthesis algorithms because of its flexibility and generality. However, the visual quality of rendered images often suffers from estimator variance, which appears as visually distracting noise. Adaptive sampling and reconstruction algorithms reduce variance by controlling the sampling density and aggregating samples in a reconstruction step, possibly over large image regions. In this paper we survey recent advances in this area. We distinguish between “a priori” methods that analyze the light transport equations and derive sampling rates and reconstruction filters from this analysis, and “a posteriori” methods that apply statistical techniques to sets of samples to drive the adaptive sampling and reconstruction process. They typically estimate the errors of several reconstruction filters, and select the best filter locally to minimize error. We discuss advantages and disadvantages of recent state-of-the-art techniques, and provide visual and quantitative comparisons. Some of these techniques are proving useful in real-world applications, and we aim to provide an overview for practitioners and researchers to assess these approaches. In addition, we discuss directions for potential further improvements.
  • Item
    Self Tuning Texture Optimization
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2015) Kaspar, Alexandre; Neubert, Boris; Lischinski, Dani; Pauly, Mark; Kopf, Johannes; Olga Sorkine-Hornung and Michael Wimmer
    The goal of example-based texture synthesis methods is to generate arbitrarily large textures from limited exemplars in order to fit the exact dimensions and resolution required for a specific modeling task. The challenge is to faithfully capture all of the visual characteristics of the exemplar texture, without introducing obvious repetitions or unnatural looking visual elements. While existing non-parametric synthesis methods have made remarkable progress towards this goal, most such methods have been demonstrated only on relatively low-resolution exemplars. Real-world high resolution textures often contain texture details at multiple scales, which these methods have difficulty reproducing faithfully. In this work, we present a new general-purpose and fully automatic selftuning non-parametric texture synthesis method that extends Texture Optimization by introducing several key improvements that result in superior synthesis ability. Our method is able to self-tune its various parameters and weights and focuses on addressing three challenging aspects of texture synthesis: (i) irregular large scale structures are faithfully reproduced through the use of automatically generated and weighted guidance channels; (ii) repetition and smoothing of texture patches is avoided by new spatial uniformity constraints; (iii) a smart initialization strategy is used in order to improve the synthesis of regular and near-regular textures, without affecting textures that do not exhibit regularities. We demonstrate the versatility and robustness of our completely automatic approach on a variety of challenging high-resolution texture exemplars.
  • Item
    Real-time Content Adaptive Depth Retargeting for Light Field Displays
    (The Eurographics Association, 2015) Adhikarla, Vamsi Kiran; Marton, Fabio; Barsi, Attila; Kovács, Péter Tamás; Balogh, Tibor; Gobbetti, Enrico; B. Solenthaler and E. Puppo
    Light field display systems present visual scenes using a set of directional light beams emitted from multiple light sources as if they are emitted from points in a physical scene. These displays offer better angular resolution and therefore provide more depth of field than other automultiscopic displays. However in some cases the size of a scene may still exceed the available depth range of a light field display. Thus, rendering on these displays requires suitable adaptation of 3D content for providing comfortable viewing experience. We propose a content adaptive depth retargeting method to automatically modify the scene depth to suit to the needs of a light field display. By analyzing the scene and using display specific parameters, we formulate and solve an optimization problem to non-linearly adapt the scene depth to display depth. Our method synthesizes the depth retargeted light field content in real-time for supporting interactive visualization and also preserves the 3D appearance of the displayed objects as much as possible.
  • Item
    Interactive HDR Environment Map Capturing on Mobile Devices
    (The Eurographics Association, 2015) Kán, Peter; B. Bickel and T. Ritschel
    Real world illumination, captured by digitizing devices, is beneficial to solve many problems in computer graphics. Therefore, practical methods for capturing this illumination are of high interest. In this paper, we present a novel method for capturing environmental illumination by a mobile device. Our method is highly practical as it requires only a consumer mobile phone and the result can be instantly used for rendering or material estimation.We capture the real light in high dynamic range (HDR) to preserve its high contrast. Our method utilizes the moving camera of a mobile phone in auto-exposure mode to reconstruct HDR values. The projection of the image to the spherical environment map is based on the orientation of the mobile device. Both HDR reconstruction and projection run on the mobile GPU to enable interactivity. Moreover, an additional image alignment step is performed. Our results show that the presented method faithfully captures the real environment and that the rendering with our reconstructed environment maps achieves high quality, comparable to reality.
  • Item
    3D Architectural Modeling: Efficient RANSAC for n-gonal Primitive Fitting
    (The Eurographics Association, 2015) Abdullah, Ahsan; Bajwa, Reema; Gilani, Syed Rizwan; Agha, Zuha; Boor, Saeed Boor; Taj, Murtaza; Khan, Sohaib Ahmed; B. Bickel and T. Ritschel
    We present a modeling approach to automatically fit 3D primitives to point clouds in order to generate a CAD like model. For detailed modeling we propose a new n-gonal 3D primitive and a novel RANSAC based fitting approach. Non-planar surfaces are modeled through surface of revolution with B-spline profiles. We first reduce the dimension by projecting the 3D data onto a 2D plane. Primitive fitting algorithm is then applied in this 2D space. Our approach compares favorably both with manually and automatically generated models. Not only is it much more time efficient than manual modeling, but it also gives significantly better output than state-of-the-art automatic methods. Since the focal technique of our approach is the fitting of detailed primitives, our results are ideal in the domain of architecture and preservation of heritage.
  • Item
    CHC+RT: Coherent Hierarchical Culling for Ray Tracing
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2015) Mattausch, Oliver; Bittner, Jirí; Jaspe, Alberto; Gobbetti, Enrico; Wimmer, Michael; Pajarola, Renato; Olga Sorkine-Hornung and Michael Wimmer
    We propose a new technique for in-core and out-of-core GPU ray tracing using a generalization of hierarchical occlusion culling in the style of the CHC++ method. Our method exploits the rasterization pipeline and hardware occlusion queries in order to create coherent batches of work for localized shader-based ray tracing kernels. By combining hierarchies in both ray space and object space, the method is able to share intermediate traversal results among multiple rays. We exploit temporal coherence among similar ray sets between frames and also within the given frame. A suitable management of the current visibility state makes it possible to benefit from occlusion culling for less coherent ray types like diffuse reflections. Since large scenes are still a challenge for modern GPU ray tracers, our method is most useful for scenes with medium to high complexity, especially since our method inherently supports ray tracing highly complex scenes that do not fit in GPU memory. For in-core scenes our method is comparable to CUDA ray tracing and performs up to 5:94 better than pure shader-based ray tracing.
  • Item
    IsoMatch: Creating Informative Grid Layouts
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2015) Fried, Ohad; DiVerdi, Stephen; Halber, Maciej; Sizikova, Elena; Finkelstein, Adam; Olga Sorkine-Hornung and Michael Wimmer
    Collections of objects such as images are often presented visually in a grid because it is a compact representation that lends itself well for search and exploration. Most grid layouts are sorted using very basic criteria, such as date or filename. In this work we present a method to arrange collections of objects respecting an arbitrary distance measure. Pairwise distances are preserved as much as possible, while still producing the specific target arrangement which may be a 2D grid, the surface of a sphere, a hierarchy, or any other shape. We show that our method can be used for infographics, collection exploration, summarization, data visualization, and even for solving problems such as where to seat family members at a wedding. We present a fast algorithm that can work on large collections and quantitatively evaluate how well distances are preserved.
  • Item
    Parallel, Realistic and Controllable Terrain Synthesis
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2015) Gain, James; Merry, Bruce; Marais, Patrick; Olga Sorkine-Hornung and Michael Wimmer
    The challenge in terrain synthesis for virtual environments is to provide a combination of precise user control over landscape form, with interactive response and visually realistic results. We present a system that builds on parallel pixel-based texture synthesis to enable interactive creation of an output terrain from a database of heightfield exemplars. We also provide modelers with control over height and surrounding slope by means of constraint points and curves; a paint-by-numbers interface for specifying the local character of terrain; coherence controls that allow localization of changes to the synthesized terrain; and copypaste functionality to directly transplant terrain regions. Together these contributions provide a level of realism that, based on user experiments, is indistinguishable from real source terrains; user control sufficient for precise placement of a variety of landforms, such as cliffs, ravines and mesas; and synthesis times of 165ms for a 10242 terrain grid.
  • Item
    Multi-Touch Table System for Medical Visualization
    (The Eurographics Association, 2015) Ynnerman, Anders; Rydell, Thomas; Persson, Anders; Ernvik, Aron; Forsell, Camilla; Ljung, Patric; Lundström, Claes; H.-C. Hege and T. Ropinski
    Medical imaging plays a central role in a vast range of healthcare practices. While the usefulness of 3D visualizations is well known, the adoption of such technology has previously been limited in many medical areas. This paper, awarded the Dirk Bartz Prize for Visual Computing in Medicine 2015, describes the development of a medical multi-touch visualization table that successfully has reached its aim to bring 3D visualization to a wider clinical audience. The descriptions summarize the targeted clinical scenarios, the key characteristics of the system, and the user feedback obtained.
  • Item
    Adaptable Anatomical Models for Realistic Bone Motion Reconstruction
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2015) Zhu, Lifeng; Hu, Xiaoyan; Kavan, Ladislav; Olga Sorkine-Hornung and Michael Wimmer
    We present a system to reconstruct subject-specific anatomy models while relying only on exterior measurements represented by point clouds. Our model combines geometry, kinematics, and skin deformations (skinning). This joint model can be adapted to different individuals without breaking its functionality, i.e., the bones and the skin remain well-articulated after the adaptation.We propose an optimization algorithm which learns the subject-specific (anthropometric) parameters from input point clouds captured using commodity depth cameras. The resulting personalized models can be used to reconstruct motion of human subjects. We validate our approach for upper and lower limbs, using both synthetic data and recordings of three different human subjects. Our reconstructed bone motion is comparable to results obtained by optical motion capture (Vicon) combined with anatomically-based inverse kinematics (OpenSIM). We demonstrate that our adapted models better preserve the joint structure than previous methods such as OpenSIM or Anatomy Transfer.