34-Issue 2
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Item Real-Time Subspace Integration for Example-Based Elastic Material(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2015) Zhang, Wenjing; Zheng, Jianmin; Thalmann, Nadia Magnenat; Olga Sorkine-Hornung and Michael WimmerExample-based material allows simulating complex material behaviors in an art-directed way. This paper presents a method for fast subspace integration for example-based elastic material, which is suitable for real-time simulation in computer graphics. At the core of the method is the formulation of a new potential using example-based Green strain tensors. By using this potential, the deformation can be attracted towards the example-based deformation feature space, the example weights can be explicitly obtained and the internal force can be decomposed into the conventional one and an additional one induced by the examples. The real-time subspace integration is then developed with subspace integration costs independent of geometric complexity, and both the reduced conventional internal force and additional one being cubic polynomials in reduced coordinates. Experiments demonstrate that our method can achieve real-time simulation while providing comparable quality with the prior art.Item Robust Statistical Pixel Estimation(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2015) Jung, Jin Woo; Meyer, Gary; DeLong, Ralph; Olga Sorkine-Hornung and Michael WimmerRobust statistical methods are employed to reduce the noise in Monte Carlo ray tracing. Through the use of resampling, the sample mean distribution is determined for each pixel. Because this distribution is uni-modal and normal for a large sample size, robust estimates converge to the true mean of the pixel values. Compared to existing methods, less additional storage is required at each pixel because the sample mean distribution can be distilled down to a compact size, and fewer computations are necessary because the robust estimation process is sampling independent and needs a small input size to compute pixel values. The robust statistical pixel estimators are not only resistant to impulse noise, but they also remove general noise from fat-tailed distributions. A substantial speedup in rendering can therefore be achieved by reducing the number of samples required for a desired image quality. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated for path tracing simulations.Item Composition-Aware Scene Optimization for Product Images(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2015) Liu, Tianqiang; McCann, Jim; Li, Wilmot; Funkhouser, Thomas; Olga Sorkine-Hornung and Michael WimmerIncreasingly, companies are creating product advertisements and catalog images using computer renderings of 3D scenes. A common goal for these companies is to create aesthetically appealing compositions that highlight objects of interest within the context of a scene. Unfortunately, this goal is challenging, not only due to the need to balance the trade-off among aesthetic principles and design constraints, but also because of the huge search space induced by possible camera parameters, object placement, material choices, etc. Previous methods have investigated only optimization of camera parameters. In this paper, we develop a tool that starts from an initial scene description and a set of high-level constraints provided by a stylist and then automatically generates an optimized scene whose 2D composition is improved. It does so by locally adjusting the 3D object transformations, surface materials, and camera parameters. The value of this tool is demonstrated in a variety of applications motivated by product catalogs, including rough layout refinement, detail image creation, home planning, cultural customization, and text inlay placement. Results of a perceptual study indicate that our system produces images preferable for product advertisement compared to a more traditional camera-only optimization.Item T-SAH: Animation Optimized Bounding Volume Hierarchies(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2015) Bittner, JirÃ; Meister, Daniel; Olga Sorkine-Hornung and Michael WimmerWe propose a method for creating a bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) that is optimized for all frames of a given animated scene. The method is based on a novel extension of surface area heuristic to temporal domain (T-SAH). We perform iterative BVH optimization using T-SAH and create a single BVH accounting for scene geometry distribution at different frames of the animation. Having a single optimized BVH for the whole animation makes our method extremely easy to integrate to any application using BVHs, limiting the per-frame overhead only to refitting the bounding volumes.We evaluated the T-SAH optimized BVHs in the scope of real-time GPU ray tracing. We demonstrate, that our method can handle even highly complex inputs with large deformations and significant topology changes. The results show, that in a vast majority of tested scenes our method provides significantly better run-time performance than traditional SAH and also better performance than GPU based per-frame BVH rebuild.Item High Reliefs from 3D Scenes(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2015) Arpa, Sami; Süsstrunk, Sabine; Hersch, Roger D.; Olga Sorkine-Hornung and Michael WimmerWe present a method for synthesizing high reliefs, a sculpting technique that attaches 3D objects onto a 2D surface within a limited depth range. The main challenges are the preservation of distinct scene parts by preserving depth discontinuities, the fine details of the shape, and the overall continuity of the scene. Bas relief depth compression methods such as gradient compression and depth range compression are not applicable for high relief production. Instead, our method is based on differential coordinates to bring scene elements to the relief plane while preserving depth discontinuities and surface details of the scene. We select a user-defined number of attenuation points within the scene, attenuate these points towards the relief plane and recompute the positions of all scene elements by preserving the differential coordinates. Finally, if the desired depth range is not achieved we apply a range compression. High relief synthesis is semi-automatic and can be controlled by user-defined parameters to adjust the depth range, as well as the placement of the scene elements with respect to the relief plane.Item Skeleton-Intrinsic Symmetrization of Shapes(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2015) Zheng, Qian; Hao, Zhuming; Huang, Hui; Xu, Kai; Zhang, Hao; Cohen-Or, Daniel; Chen, Baoquan; Olga Sorkine-Hornung and Michael WimmerEnhancing the self-symmetry of a shape is of fundamental aesthetic virtue. In this paper, we are interested in recovering the aesthetics of intrinsic reflection symmetries, where an asymmetric shape is symmetrized while keeping its general pose and perceived dynamics. The key challenge to intrinsic symmetrization is that the input shape has only approximate reflection symmetries, possibly far from perfect. The main premise of our work is that curve skeletons provide a concise and effective shape abstraction for analyzing approximate intrinsic symmetries as well as symmetrization. By measuring intrinsic distances over a curve skeleton for symmetry analysis, symmetrizing the skeleton, and then propagating the symmetrization from skeleton to shape, our approach to shape symmetrization is skeleton-intrinsic. Specifically, given an input shape and an extracted curve skeleton, we introduce the notion of a backbone as the path in the skeleton graph about which a self-matching of the input shape is optimal. We define an objective function for the reflective self-matching and develop an algorithm based on genetic programming to solve the global search problem for the backbone. The extracted backbone then guides the symmetrization of the skeleton, which in turn, guides the symmetrization of the whole shape. We show numerous intrinsic symmetrization results of hand drawn sketches and artist-modeled or reconstructed 3D shapes, as well as several applications of skeleton-intrinsic symmetrization of shapes.Item Implicit Formulation for SPH-based Viscous Fluids(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2015) Takahashi, Tetsuya; Dobashi, Yoshinori; Fujishiro, Issei; Nishita, Tomoyuki; Lin, Ming C.; Olga Sorkine-Hornung and Michael WimmerWe propose a stable and efficient particle-based method for simulating highly viscous fluids that can generate coiling and buckling phenomena and handle variable viscosity. In contrast to previous methods that use explicit integration, our method uses an implicit formulation to improve the robustness of viscosity integration, therefore enabling use of larger time steps and higher viscosities. We use Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics to solve the full form of viscosity, constructing a sparse linear system with a symmetric positive definite matrix, while exploiting the variational principle that automatically enforces the boundary condition on free surfaces. We also propose a new method for extracting coefficients of the matrix contributed by second-ring neighbor particles to efficiently solve the linear system using a conjugate gradient solver. Several examples demonstrate the robustness and efficiency of our implicit formulation over previous methods and illustrate the versatility of our method.Item Shape-from-Operator: Recovering Shapes from Intrinsic Operators(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2015) Boscaini, Davide; Eynard, Davide; Kourounis, Drosos; Bronstein, Michael M.; Olga Sorkine-Hornung and Michael WimmerWe formulate the problem of shape-from-operator (SfO), recovering an embedding of a mesh from intrinsic operators defined through the discrete metric (edge lengths). Particularly interesting instances of our SfO problem include: shape-from-Laplacian, allowing to transfer style between shapes; shape-from-difference operator, used to synthesize shape analogies; and shape-from-eigenvectors, allowing to generate 'intrinsic averages' of shape collections. Numerically, we approach the SfO problem by splitting it into two optimization sub-problems: metric-from-operator (reconstruction of the discrete metric from the intrinsic operator) and embedding-from-metric (finding a shape embedding that would realize a given metric, a setting of the multidimensional scaling problem). We study numerical properties of our problem, exemplify it on several applications, and discuss its imitations.Item High-Order Recursive Filtering of Non-Uniformly Sampled Signals for Image and Video Processing(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2015) Gastal, Eduardo S. L.; Oliveira, Manuel M.; Olga Sorkine-Hornung and Michael WimmerWe present a discrete-time mathematical formulation for applying recursive digital filters to non-uniformly sampled signals. Our solution presents several desirable features: it preserves the stability of the original filters; is well-conditioned for low-pass, high-pass, and band-pass filters alike; its cost is linear in the number of samples and is not affected by the size of the filter support. Our method is general and works with any non-uniformly sampled signal and any recursive digital filter defined by a difference equation. Since our formulation directly uses the filter coefficients, it works out-of-the-box with existing methodologies for digital filter design. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by filtering non-uniformly sampled signals in various image and video processing tasks including edge-preserving color filtering, noise reduction, stylization, and detail enhancement. Our formulation enables, for the first time, edge-aware evaluation of any recursive infinite impulse response digital filter (not only low-pass), producing high-quality filtering results in real time.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 WimmerThe 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 A Cut-Cell Geometric Multigrid Poisson Solver for Fluid Simulation(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2015) Weber, Daniel; Mueller-Roemer, Johannes; Stork, André; Fellner, Dieter W.; Olga Sorkine-Hornung and Michael WimmerWe present a novel multigrid scheme based on a cut-cell formulation on regular staggered grids which generates compatible systems of linear equations on all levels of the multigrid hierarchy. This geometrically motivated formulation is derived from a finite volume approach and exhibits an improved rate of convergence compared to previous methods. Existing fluid solvers with voxelized domains can directly benefit from this approach by only modifying the representation of the non-fluid domain. The necessary building blocks are fully parallelizable and can therefore benefit from multi- and many-core architectures.Item Hallucinating Stereoscopy from a Single Image(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2015) Zeng, Qiong; Chen, Wenzheng; Wang, Huan; Tu, Changhe; Cohen-Or, Daniel; Lischinski, Dani; Chen, Baoquan; Olga Sorkine-Hornung and Michael WimmerWe introduce a novel method for enabling stereoscopic viewing of a scene from a single pre-segmented image. Rather than attempting full 3D reconstruction or accurate depth map recovery, we hallucinate a rough approximation of the scene's 3D model using a number of simple depth and occlusion cues and shape priors. We begin by depth-sorting the segments, each of which is assumed to represent a separate object in the scene, resulting in a collection of depth layers. The shapes and textures of the partially occluded segments are then completed using symmetry and convexity priors. Next, each completed segment is converted to a union of generalized cylinders yielding a rough 3D model for each object. Finally, the object depths are refined using an iterative ground fitting process. The hallucinated 3D model of the scene may then be used to generate a stereoscopic image pair, or to produce images from novel viewpoints within a small neighborhood of the original view. Despite the simplicity of our approach, we show that it compares favorably with state-of-the-art depth ordering methods. A user study was conducted showing that our method produces more convincing stereoscopic images than existing semi-interactive and automatic single image depth recovery methods.Item A Dimension-reduced Pressure Solver for Liquid Simulations(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2015) Ando, Ryoichi; Thürey, Nils; Wojtan, Chris; Olga Sorkine-Hornung and Michael WimmerThis work presents a method for efficiently simplifying the pressure projection step in a liquid simulation. We first devise a straightforward dimension reduction technique that dramatically reduces the cost of solving the pressure projection. Next, we introduce a novel change of basis that satisfies free-surface boundary conditions exactly, regardless of the accuracy of the pressure solve. When combined, these ideas greatly reduce the computational complexity of the pressure solve without compromising free surface boundary conditions at the highest level of detail. Our techniques are easy to parallelize, and they effectively eliminate the computational bottleneck for large liquid simulations.Item IlluminationCut(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2015) Bus, Norbert; Mustafa, Nabil H.; Biri, Venceslas; Olga Sorkine-Hornung and Michael WimmerWe present a novel algorithm, IlluminationCut, for rendering images using the many-lights framework. It handles any light source that can be approximated with virtual point lights (VPLs) as well as highly glossy materials. The algorithm extends the Multidimensional Lightcuts technique by effectively creating an illumination-aware clustering of the product-space of the set of points to be shaded and the set of VPLs. Additionally, the number of visibility queries for each product-space cluster is reduced by using an adaptive sampling technique. Our framework is flexible and achieves around 3 - 6 times speedup over previous state-of-the-art methods.Item CHC+RT: Coherent Hierarchical Culling for Ray Tracing(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2015) Mattausch, Oliver; Bittner, JirÃ; Jaspe, Alberto; Gobbetti, Enrico; Wimmer, Michael; Pajarola, Renato; Olga Sorkine-Hornung and Michael WimmerWe 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 Interactive Dimensioning of Parametric Models(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2015) Kelly, Tom; Wonka, Peter; Müller, Pascal; Olga Sorkine-Hornung and Michael WimmerWe propose a solution for the dimensioning of parametric and procedural models. Dimensioning has long been a staple of technical drawings, and we present the first solution for interactive dimensioning: a dimension line positioning system that adapts to the view direction, given behavioral properties. After proposing a set of design principles for interactive dimensioning, we describe our solution consisting of the following major components. First, we describe how an author can specify the desired interactive behavior of a dimension line. Second, we propose a novel algorithm to place dimension lines at interactive speeds. Third, we introduce multiple extensions, including chained dimension lines, controls for different parameter types (e.g. discrete choices, angles), and the use of dimension lines for interactive editing. Our results show the use of dimension lines in an interactive parametric modeling environment for architectural, botanical, and mechanical models.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 WimmerCollections 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 Improving Sampling-based Motion Control(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2015) Liu, Libin; Yin, KangKang; Guo, Baining; Olga Sorkine-Hornung and Michael WimmerWe address several limitations of the sampling-based motion control method of Liu et at. [LYvdP 10]. The key insight is to learn from the past control reconstruction trials through sample distribution adaptation. Coupled with a sliding window scheme for better performance and an averaging method for noise reduction, the improved algorithm can efficiently construct open-loop controls for long and challenging reference motions in good quality. Our ideas are intuitive and the implementations are simple. We compare the improved algorithm with the original algorithm both qualitatively and quantitatively, and demonstrate the effectiveness of the improved algorithm with a variety of motions ranging from stylized walking and dancing to gymnastic and Martial Arts routines.Item Approximating the Generalized Voronoi Diagram of Closely Spaced Objects(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2015) Edwards, John; Daniel, Eric; Pascucci, Valerio; Bajaj, Chandrajit; Olga Sorkine-Hornung and Michael WimmerWe present an algorithm to compute an approximation of the generalized Voronoi diagram (GVD) on arbitrary collections of 2D or 3D geometric objects. In particular, we focus on datasets with closely spaced objects; GVD approximation is expensive and sometimes intractable on these datasets using previous algorithms. With our approach, the GVD can be computed using commodity hardware even on datasets with many, extremely tightly packed objects. Our approach is to subdivide the space with an octree that is represented with an adjacency structure. We then use a novel adaptive distance transform to compute the distance function on octree vertices. The computed distance field is sampled more densely in areas of close object spacing, enabling robust and parallelizable GVD surface generation. We demonstrate our method on a variety of data and show example applications of the GVD in 2D and 3D.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 WimmerThe 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.