37-Issue 2

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https://diglib.eg.org/handle/10.2312/2632120

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Aura Mesh: Motion Retargeting to Preserve the Spatial Relationships between Skinned Characters
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2018) Jin, Taeil; Kim, Meekyoung; Lee, Sung-Hee; Gutierrez, Diego and Sheffer, Alla
Applying motion-capture data to multi-person interaction between virtual characters is challenging because one needs to preserve the interaction semantics while also satisfying the general requirements of motion retargeting, such as preventing penetration and preserving naturalness. An efficient means of representing interaction semantics is by defining the spatial relationships between the body parts of characters. However, existing methods consider only the character skeleton and thus are not suitable for capturing skin-level spatial relationships. This paper proposes a novel method for retargeting interaction motions with respect to character skins. Specifically, we introduce the aura mesh, which is a volumetric mesh that surrounds a character's skin. The spatial relationships between two characters are computed from the overlap of the skin mesh of one character and the aura mesh of the other, and then the interaction motion retargeting is achieved by preserving the spatial relationships as much as possible while satisfying other constraints. We show the effectiveness of our method through a number of experiments.
Single-image Tomography: 3D Volumes from 2D Cranial X-Rays
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2018) Henzler, Philipp; Rasche, Volker; Ropinski, Timo; Ritschel, Tobias; Gutierrez, Diego and Sheffer, Alla
As many different 3D volumes could produce the same 2D x-ray image, inverting this process is challenging. We show that recent deep learning-based convolutional neural networks can solve this task. As the main challenge in learning is the sheer amount of data created when extending the 2D image into a 3D volume, we suggest firstly to learn a coarse, fixed-resolution volume which is then fused in a second step with the input x-ray into a high-resolution volume. To train and validate our approach we introduce a new dataset that comprises of close to half a million computer-simulated 2D x-ray images of 3D volumes scanned from 175 mammalian species. Future applications of our approach include stereoscopic rendering of legacy x-ray images, re-rendering of x-rays including changes of illumination, view pose or geometry. Our evaluation includes comparison to previous tomography work, previous learning methods using our data, a user study and application to a set of real x-rays.
Approximate Program Smoothing Using Mean-Variance Statistics, with Application to Procedural Shader Bandlimiting
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2018) Yang, Yuting; Barnes, Connelly; Gutierrez, Diego and Sheffer, Alla
We introduce a general method to approximate the convolution of a program with a Gaussian kernel. This results in the program being smoothed. Our compiler framework models intermediate values in the program as random variables, by using mean and variance statistics. We decompose the input program into atomic parts and relate the statistics of the different parts of the smoothed program. We give several approximate smoothing rules that can be used for the parts of the program. These include an improved variant of Dorn et al. [DBLW15], a novel adaptive Gaussian approximation, Monte Carlo sampling, and compactly supported kernels. Our adaptive Gaussian approximation handles multivariate Gaussian distributed inputs, gives exact results for a larger class of programs than previous work, and is accurate to the second order in the standard deviation of the kernel for programs with certain analytic properties. Because each expression in the program can have multiple approximation choices, we use a genetic search to automatically select the best approximations. We apply this framework to the problem of automatically bandlimiting procedural shader programs. We evaluate our method on a variety of geometries and complex shaders, including shaders with parallax mapping, animation, and spatially varying statistics. The resulting smoothed shader programs outperform previous approaches both numerically and aesthetically.
A Versatile Parameterization for Measured Material Manifolds
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2018) Soler, Cyril; Subr, Kartic; Nowrouzezahrai, Derek; Gutierrez, Diego and Sheffer, Alla
A popular approach for computing photorealistic images of virtual objects requires applying reflectance profiles measured from real surfaces, introducing several challenges: the memory needed to faithfully capture realistic material reflectance is large, the choice of materials is limited to the set of measurements, and image synthesis using the measured data is costly. Typically, this data is either compressed by projecting it onto a subset of its linear principal components or by applying non-linear methods. The former requires many components to faithfully represent the input reflectance, whereas the latter necessitates costly extrapolation algorithms. We learn an underlying, low-dimensional non-linear reflectance manifold amenable to rapid exploration and rendering of real-world materials. We can express interpolated materials as linear combinations of the measured data, despite them lying on an inherently non-linear manifold. This allows us to efficiently interpolate and extrapolate measured BRDFs, and to render directly from the manifold representation. We exploit properties of Gaussian process latent variable models and use our representation for high-performance and offline rendering with interpolated real-world materials.
Extended Narrow Band FLIP for Liquid Simulations
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2018) Sato, Takahiro; Wojtan, Chris; Thuerey, Nils; Igarashi, Takeo; Ando, Ryoichi; Gutierrez, Diego and Sheffer, Alla
The Fluid Implicit Particle method (FLIP) reduces numerical dissipation by combining particles with grids. To improve performance, the subsequent narrow band FLIP method (NB-FLIP) uses a FLIP-based fluid simulation only near the liquid surface and a traditional grid-based fluid simulation away from the surface. This spatially-limited FLIP simulation significantly reduces the number of particles and alleviates a computational bottleneck. In this paper, we extend the NB-FLIP idea even further, by allowing a simulation to transition between a FLIP-like fluid simulation and a grid-based simulation in arbitrary locations, not just near the surface. This approach leads to even more savings in memory and computation, because we can concentrate the particles only in areas where they are needed. More importantly, this new method allows us to seamlessly transition to smooth implicit surface geometry wherever the particle-based simulation is unnecessary. Consequently, our method leads to a practical algorithm for avoiding the noisy surface artifacts associated with particle-based liquid simulations, while simultaneously maintaining the benefits of a FLIP simulation in regions of dynamic motion.
EUROGRAPHICS 2018: CGF 37-2 Frontmatter
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2018) Gutierrez, Diego; Sheffer, Alla; Gutierrez, Diego; Sheffer, Alla
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ExpandNet: A Deep Convolutional Neural Network for High Dynamic Range Expansion from Low Dynamic Range Content
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2018) Marnerides, Demetris; Bashford-Rogers, Thomas; Hatchett, Jon; Debattista, Kurt; Gutierrez, Diego and Sheffer, Alla
High dynamic range (HDR) imaging provides the capability of handling real world lighting as opposed to the traditional low dynamic range (LDR) which struggles to accurately represent images with higher dynamic range. However, most imaging content is still available only in LDR. This paper presents a method for generating HDR content from LDR content based on deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) termed ExpandNet. ExpandNet accepts LDR images as input and generates images with an expanded range in an end-to-end fashion. The model attempts to reconstruct missing information that was lost from the original signal due to quantization, clipping, tone mapping or gamma correction. The added information is reconstructed from learned features, as the network is trained in a supervised fashion using a dataset of HDR images. The approach is fully automatic and data driven; it does not require any heuristics or human expertise. ExpandNet uses a multiscale architecture which avoids the use of upsampling layers to improve image quality. The method performs well compared to expansion/inverse tone mapping operators quantitatively on multiple metrics, even for badly exposed inputs.
Multiple Scattering in Inhomogeneous Participating Media Using Rao-Blackwellization and Control Variates
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2018) Szirmay-Kalos, László; Magdics, Milán; Sbert, Mateu; Gutierrez, Diego and Sheffer, Alla
Rendering inhomogeneous participating media requires a lot of volume samples since the extinction coefficient needs to be integrated along light paths. Ray marching makes small steps, which is time consuming and leads to biased algorithms. Woodcocklike approaches use analytic sampling and a random rejection scheme guaranteeing that the expectations will be the same as in the original model. These models and the application of control variates for the extinction have been successful to compute transmittance and single scattering but were not fully exploited in multiple scattering simulation. Our paper attacks the multiple scattering problem in heterogeneous media and modifies the light-medium interaction model to allow the use of simple analytic formulae while preserving the correct expected values. The model transformation reduces the variance of the estimates with the help of Rao-Blackwellization and control variates applied both for the extinction coefficient and the incident radiance. Based on the transformed model, efficient Monte Carlo rendering algorithms are obtained.
Semantic Segmentation for Line Drawing Vectorization Using Neural Networks
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2018) Kim, Byungsoo; Wang, Oliver; Öztireli, A. Cengiz; Gross, Markus; Gutierrez, Diego and Sheffer, Alla
In this work, we present a method to vectorize raster images of line art. Inverting the rasterization procedure is inherently ill-conditioned, as there exist many possible vector images that could yield the same raster image. However, not all of these vector images are equally useful to the user, especially if performing further edits is desired. We therefore define the problem of computing an instance segmentation of the most likely set of paths that could have created the raster image. Once the segmentation is computed, we use existing vectorization approaches to vectorize each path, and then combine all paths into the final output vector image. To determine which set of paths is most likely, we train a pair of neural networks to provide semantic clues that help resolve ambiguities at intersection and overlap regions. These predictions are made considering the full context of the image, and are then globally combined by solving a Markov Random Field (MRF). We demonstrate the flexibility of our method by generating results on character datasets, a synthetic random line dataset, and a dataset composed of human drawn sketches. For all cases, our system accurately recovers paths that adhere to the semantics of the drawings.
String Art: Towards Computational Fabrication of String Images
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2018) Birsak, Michael; Rist, Florian; Wonka, Peter; Musialski, Przemyslaw; Gutierrez, Diego and Sheffer, Alla
In this paper we propose a novel method for the automatic computation and digital fabrication of artistic string images. String art is a technique used by artists for the creation of abstracted images which are composed of straight lines of strings tensioned between pins distributed on a frame. Together the strings fuse to a perceptible image. Traditionally, artists craft such images manually in a highly sophisticated and tedious design process. To achieve this goal fully automatically we propose a computational setup driven by a discrete optimization algorithm which takes an ordinary picture as input and converts it into a connected graph of strings that tries to reassemble the input image best possibly. Furthermore, we propose a hardware setup for automatic digital fabrication of these images using an industrial robot that spans the strings. Finally, we demonstrate the applicability of our approach by generating and fabricating a set of real string art images.
Example-based Authoring of Procedural Modeling Programs with Structural and Continuous Variability
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2018) Ritchie, Daniel; Jobalia, Sarah; Thomas, Anna; Gutierrez, Diego and Sheffer, Alla
Procedural models are a powerful tool for quickly creating a variety of computer graphics content. However, authoring them is challenging, requiring both programming and artistic expertise. In this paper, we present a method for learning procedural models from a small number of example objects. We focus on the modular design setting, where objects are constructed from a common library of parts. Our procedural representation is a probabilistic program that models both the discrete, hierarchical structure of the examples as well as the continuous variability in their spatial arrangements of parts. We develop an algorithm for learning such programs from examples, using combinatorial search over program structures and variational inference to estimate continuous program parameters. We evaluate our method by demonstrating its ability to learn programs from examples of ornamental designs, spaceships, space stations, and castles. Experiments suggest that our learned programs can reliably generate a variety of new objects that are perceptually indistinguishable from hand-crafted examples.
MIQP-based Layout Design for Building Interiors
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2018) Wu, Wenming; Fan, Lubin; Liu, Ligang; Wonka, Peter; Gutierrez, Diego and Sheffer, Alla
We propose a hierarchical framework for the generation of building interiors. Our solution is based on a mixed integer quadratic programming (MIQP) formulation. We parametrize a layout by polygons that are further decomposed into small rectangles. We identify important high-level constraints, such as room size, room position, room adjacency, and the outline of the building, and formulate them in a way that is compatible with MIQP and the problem parametrization. We also propose a hierarchical framework to improve the scalability of the approach. We demonstrate that our algorithm can be used for residential building layouts and can be scaled up to large layouts such as office buildings, shopping malls, and supermarkets. We show that our method is faster by multiple orders of magnitude than previous methods.
Motion Sickness Simulation Based on Sensorimotor Control
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2018) Hu, Chen-Hui; Lin, Wen-Chieh; Gutierrez, Diego and Sheffer, Alla
Sensorimotor control is an essential mechanism for human motions, from involuntary reflex actions to intentional motor skill learning, such as walking, jumping, and swimming. Humans perform various motions according to different task goals and physiological sensory perception; however, most existing computational approaches for motion simulation and generation rarely consider the effects of human perception. The assumption of perfect perception (i.e., no sensory errors) of existing approaches restricts the generated motion types and makes dynamical reactions less realistic. We propose a general framework for sensorimotor control, integrating a balance controller and a vestibular model, to generate perception-aware motions. By exploiting simulated perception, more natural responses that are closer to human reactions can be generated. For example, motion sickness caused by the impairments in the function of the vestibular system induces postural instability and body sway. Our approach generates physically correct motions and reasonable reactions to external stimuli since the spatial orientation estimation by the vestibular system is essential to preserve balance. We evaluate our framework by demonstrating standing balance on a rotational platform with different angular speeds and duration. The generated motions show that either faster angular speeds or longer rotational duration cause more severe motion sickness. Our results demonstrate that sensorimotor control, integrating human perception and physically-based control, offers considerable potential for providing more human-like behaviors, especially for perceptual illusions of human beings, including visual, proprioceptive, and tactile sensations.
Interactive Generation of Time-evolving, Snow-Covered Landscapes with Avalanches
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2018) Cordonnier, Guillaume; Ecormier, Pierre; Galin, Eric; Gain, James; Benes, Bedrich; Cani, Marie-Paule; Gutierrez, Diego and Sheffer, Alla
We introduce a novel method for interactive generation of visually consistent, snow-covered landscapes and provide control of their dynamic evolution over time. Our main contribution is the real-time phenomenological simulation of avalanches and other user-guided events, such as tracks left by Nordic skiing, which can be applied to interactively sculpt the landscape. The terrain is modeled as a height field with additional layers for stable, compacted, unstable, and powdery snow, which behave in combination as a semi-viscous fluid. We incorporate the impact of several phenomena, including sunlight, temperature, prevailing wind direction, and skiing activities. The snow evolution includes snow-melt and snow-drift, which a ect stability of the snow mass and the probability of avalanches. A user can shape landscapes and their evolution either with a variety of interactive brushes, or by prescribing events along a winter season time-line. Our optimized GPU-implementation allows interactive updates of snow type and depth across a large (10 10km) terrain, including real-time avalanches, making this suitable for visual assets in computer games. We evaluate our method through perceptual comparison against exiting methods and real snow-depth data.
Feature Curve Co-Completion in Noisy Data
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2018) Gehre, Anne; Lim, Isaak; Kobbelt, Leif; Gutierrez, Diego and Sheffer, Alla
Feature curves on 3D shapes provide important hints about significant parts of the geometry and reveal their underlying structure. However, when we process real world data, automatically detected feature curves are affected by measurement uncertainty, missing data, and sampling resolution, leading to noisy, fragmented, and incomplete feature curve networks. These artifacts make further processing unreliable. In this paper we analyze the global co-occurrence information in noisy feature curve networks to fill in missing data and suppress weakly supported feature curves. For this we propose an unsupervised approach to find meaningful structure within the incomplete data by detecting multiple occurrences of feature curve configurations (cooccurrence analysis). We cluster and merge these into feature curve templates, which we leverage to identify strongly supported feature curve segments as well as to complete missing data in the feature curve network. In the presence of significant noise, previous approaches had to resort to user input, while our method performs fully automatic feature curve co-completion. Finding feature reoccurrences however, is challenging since naïve feature curve comparison fails in this setting due to fragmentation and partial overlaps of curve segments. To tackle this problem we propose a robust method for partial curve matching. This provides us with the means to apply symmetry detection methods to identify co-occurring configurations. Finally, Bayesian model selection enables us to detect and group re-occurrences that describe the data well and with low redundancy.
A Physically Consistent Implicit Viscosity Solver for SPH Fluids
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2018) Weiler, Marcel; Koschier, Dan; Brand, Magnus; Bender, Jan; Gutierrez, Diego and Sheffer, Alla
In this paper, we present a novel physically consistent implicit solver for the simulation of highly viscous fluids using the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) formalism. Our method is the result of a theoretical and practical in-depth analysis of the most recent implicit SPH solvers for viscous materials. Based on our findings, we developed a list of requirements that are vital to produce a realistic motion of a viscous fluid. These essential requirements include momentum conservation, a physically meaningful behavior under temporal and spatial refinement, the absence of ghost forces induced by spurious viscosities and the ability to reproduce complex physical effects that can be observed in nature. On the basis of several theoretical analyses, quantitative academic comparisons and complex visual experiments we show that none of the recent approaches is able to satisfy all requirements. In contrast, our proposed method meets all demands and therefore produces realistic animations in highly complex scenarios. We demonstrate that our solver outperforms former approaches in terms of physical accuracy and memory consumption while it is comparable in terms of computational performance. In addition to the implicit viscosity solver, we present a method to simulate melting objects. Therefore, we generalize the viscosity model to a spatially varying viscosity field and provide an SPH discretization of the heat equation.
Terrain Super-resolution through Aerial Imagery and Fully Convolutional Networks
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2018) Argudo, Oscar; Chica, Antonio; Andujar, Carlos; Gutierrez, Diego and Sheffer, Alla
Despite recent advances in surveying techniques, publicly available Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) of terrains are lowresolution except for selected places on Earth. In this paper we present a new method to turn low-resolution DEMs into plausible and faithful high-resolution terrains. Unlike other approaches for terrain synthesis/amplification (fractal noise, hydraulic and thermal erosion, multi-resolution dictionaries), we benefit from high-resolution aerial images to produce highly-detailed DEMs mimicking the features of the real terrain. We explore different architectures for Fully Convolutional Neural Networks to learn upsampling patterns for DEMs from detailed training sets (high-resolution DEMs and orthophotos), yielding up to one order of magnitude more resolution. Our comparative results show that our method outperforms competing data amplification approaches in terms of elevation accuracy and terrain plausibility.
Fast Fluid Simulations with Sparse Volumes on the GPU
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2018) Wu, Kui; Truong, Nghia; Yuksel, Cem; Hoetzlein, Rama; Gutierrez, Diego and Sheffer, Alla
We introduce efficient, large scale fluid simulation on GPU hardware using the fluid-implicit particle (FLIP) method over a sparse hierarchy of grids represented in NVIDIA R GVDB Voxels. Our approach handles tens of millions of particles within a virtually unbounded simulation domain. We describe novel techniques for parallel sparse grid hierarchy construction and fast incremental updates on the GPU for moving particles. In addition, our FLIP technique introduces sparse, work efficient parallel data gathering from particle to voxel, and a matrix-free GPU-based conjugate gradient solver optimized for sparse grids. Our results show that our method can achieve up to an order of magnitude faster simulations on the GPU as compared to FLIP simulations running on the CPU.
Practical Radiometric Compensation for Projection Display on Textured Surfaces using a Multidimensional Model
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2018) Li, Yuqi; Majumder, Aditi; Gopi, Meenakshisundaram; Wang, Chong; Zhao, Jieyu; Gutierrez, Diego and Sheffer, Alla
Radiometric compensation methods remove the effect of the underlying spatially varying surface reflectance of the texture when projecting on textured surfaces. All prior work sample the surface reflectance dependent radiometric transfer function from the projector to the camera at every pixel that requires the camera to observe tens or hundreds of images projected by the projector. In this paper, we cast the radiometric compensation problem as a sampling and reconstruction of multi-dimensional radiometric transfer function that models the color transfer function from the projector to an observing camera and the surface reflectance in a unified manner. Such a multi-dimensional representation makes no assumption about linearity of the projector to camera color transfer function and can therefore handle projectors with non-linear color transfer functions(e.g. DLP, LCOS, LED-based or laser-based).We show that with a well-curated sampling of this multi-dimensional function, achieved by exploiting the following key properties, is adequate for its accurate representation: (a) the spectral reflectance of most real-world materials are smooth and can be well-represented using a lower-dimension function; (b) the reflectance properties of the underlying texture have strong redundancies –- for example, multiple pixels or even regions can have similar surface reflectance; (c) the color transfer function from the projector to camera have strong input coherence. The proposed sampling allows us to reduce the number of projected images that needs to be observed by a camera by up to two orders of magnitude, the minimum being only two. We then present a new multi-dimensional scattered data interpolation technique to reconstruct the radiometric transfer function at a high spatial density (i.e. at every pixel) to compute the compensation image. We show that the accuracy of our interpolation technique is higher than any existing methods.
Parallel Reinsertion for Bounding Volume Hierarchy Optimization
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2018) Meister, Daniel; Bittner, Jiří; Gutierrez, Diego and Sheffer, Alla
We present a novel highly parallel method for optimizing bounding volume hierarchies (BVH) targeting contemporary GPU architectures. The core of our method is based on the insertion-based BVH optimization that is known to achieve excellent results in terms of the SAH cost. The original algorithm is, however, inherently sequential: no efficient parallel version of the method exists, which limits its practical utility. We reformulate the algorithm while exploiting the observation that there is no need to remove the nodes from the BVH prior to finding their optimized positions in the tree. We can search for the optimized positions for all nodes in parallel while simultaneously tracking the corresponding SAH cost reduction.We update in parallel all nodes for which better position was found while efficiently handling potential conflicts during these updates. We implemented our algorithm in CUDA and evaluated the resulting BVH in the context of the GPU ray tracing. The results indicate that the method is able to achieve the best ray traversal performance among the state of the art GPU-based BVH construction methods.

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