34-Issue 7
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Item Efficient Variational Light Field View Synthesis For Making Stereoscopic 3D Images(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2015) Zhang, Lei; Zhang, Yu-Hang; Huang, Hua; Stam, Jos and Mitra, Niloy J. and Xu, KunWe present a novel approach for making stereoscopic images by variational view synthesis on the multi-perspective light field. With the intended disparities as constraints, we specialize the generative variational model by incorporating per-pixel viewpoint assignment to synthesize the stereo pair. Also, we improve the variational solution by use of explicit weighted average on the light field. Our algorithm is able to handle arbitrary disparity remapping, thus enabling more flexible disparity control for the desired stereoscopic effect. The experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency for making the stereoscopic 3D images based on the light field.Item Multiple Facial Image Editing Using Edge-Aware PDE Learning(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2015) Liang, Lingyu; Jin, Lianwen; Zhang, Xin; Xu, Yong; Stam, Jos and Mitra, Niloy J. and Xu, KunThis paper introduces a novel facial editing tool, called edge-aware mask, to achieve multiple photo-realistic rendering effects in a unified framework. The edge-aware masks facilitate three basic operations for adaptive facial editing, including region selection, edit setting and region blending. Inspired by the state-of-the-art edit propagation and partial differential equation (PDE) learning method, we propose an adaptive PDE model with facial priors for masks generation through edge-aware diffusion. The edge-aware masks can automatically fit the complex region boundary with great accuracy and produce smooth transition between different regions, which significantly improves the visual consistence of face editing and reduce the human intervention. Then, a unified and flexible facial editing framework is constructed, which consists of layer decomposition, edge-aware masks generation, and layer/mask composition. The combinations of multiple facial layers and edge-aware masks can achieve various facial effects simultaneously, including face enhancement, relighting, makeup and face blending etc. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations were performed using different datasets for different facial editing tasks. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of our methods, and the comparisons with the previous methods indicate that improved results are obtained using the combination of multiple edge-aware masks.Item Geometrically Exact Simulation of Inextensible Ribbon(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2015) Shen, Zhongwei; Huang, Jin; Chen, Wei; Bao, Hujun; Stam, Jos and Mitra, Niloy J. and Xu, KunNarrow, inextensible, and naturally flat ribbons have some special and interesting phenomena under isometric deformations. Although a ribbon has a shape between rod and shell, directly applying the geometric representation designed for them imposes a challenge to faithfully reproduce interesting behaviors. We thus parameterize the ribbon surface as a developable ruled surface along its centerline and represent it using a framed centerline curve. Then the elastic and kinetic energy of the ribbon surface can be equivalently yet compactly described by the framed centerline curve only. To avoid numerical singularity when developability is violated, a finite Taylor series approximation to the potential energy is adopted. Under the observation that the off-centerline part of ribbon contributes little dynamic effect, the kinetic energy is simplified with respect to the centerline velocity only. For efficiency, each time step is separated into two stages: dynamically evolving the centerline, and then quasi-statically updating the ruling. We validate the method with qualitative analysis and ribbon specific phenomena comparisons with real-world scenarios. A set of comparisons to rod and shell model is also provided to demonstrate the advantages of our method.Item Deformable Objects Collision Handling with Fast Convergence(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2015) Li, Siwang; Pan, Zherong; Huang, Jin; Bao, Hujun; Jin, Xiaogang; Stam, Jos and Mitra, Niloy J. and Xu, KunWe present a stable and efficient simulator for deformable objects with collisions and contacts. For stability, an optimization derived from the implicit time integrator is solved in each timestep under the inequality constraints coming from collisions. To achieve fast convergence, we extend the MPRGP based solver from handling box constraints only to handling general linear constraints and prove its convergence. This generalization introduces a cost of solving dense linear systems in each step, but these systems can be reduced into diagonal ones for efficiency without affecting the general stability via pruning redundant collisions. Our solver is an order of magnitude faster, especially for elastic objects under large deformation compared with iterative constraint anticipation method (ICA), a typical method for stability. The efficiency, robustness and stability are further verified by our results.Item Multi-layer Lattice Model for Real-Time Dynamic Character Deformation(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2015) Iwamoto, Naoya; Shum, Hubert P. H.; Yang, Longzhi; Morishima, Shigeo; Stam, Jos and Mitra, Niloy J. and Xu, KunDue to the recent advancement of computer graphics hardware and software algorithms, deformable characters have become more and more popular in real-time applications such as computer games. While there are mature techniques to generate primary deformation from skeletal movement, simulating realistic and stable secondary deformation such as jiggling of fats remains challenging. On one hand, traditional volumetric approaches such as the finite element method require higher computational cost and are infeasible for limited hardware such as game consoles. On the other hand, while shape matching based simulations can produce plausible deformation in real-time, they suffer from a stiffness problem in which particles either show unrealistic deformation due to high gains, or cannot catch up with the body movement. In this paper, we propose a unified multi-layer lattice model to simulate the primary and secondary deformation of skeleton-driven characters. The core idea is to voxelize the input character mesh into multiple anatomical layers including the bone, muscle, fat and skin. Primary deformation is applied on the bone voxels with lattice-based skinning. The movement of these voxels is propagated to other voxel layers using lattice shape matching simulation, creating a natural secondary deformation. Our multi-layer lattice framework can produce simulation quality comparable to those from other volumetric approaches with a significantly smaller computational cost. It is best to be applied in real-time applications such as console games or interactive animation creation.Item Realtime Rendering Glossy to Glossy Reflections in Screen Space(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2015) Xu, Chao; Wang, Rui; Bao, Hujun; Stam, Jos and Mitra, Niloy J. and Xu, KunGlossy to glossy reflections are lights bounced between glossy surfaces. Such directional light transports are important for humans to perceive glossy materials, but difficult to simulate. This paper proposes a new method for rendering screen-space glossy to glossy reflections in realtime. We use spherical von Mises-Fisher (vMF) distributions to model glossy BRDFs at surfaces, and employ screen space directional occlusion (SSDO) rendering framework to trace indirect light transports bounced in the screen space. As our main contributions, we derive a new parameterization of vMF distribution so as to convert the non-linear fit of multiple vMF distributions into a linear sum in the new space. Then, we present a new linear filtering technique to build MIP-maps on glossy BRDFs, which allows us to create filtered radiance transfer functions at runtime, and efficiently estimate indirect glossy to glossy reflections. We demonstrate our method in a realtime application for rendering scenes with dynamic glossy objects. Compared with screen space directional occlusion, our approach only requires one extra texture and has a negligible overhead, 3% ˜ 6% loss at frame rate, but enables glossy to glossy reflections.Item TightCCD: Efficient and Robust Continuous Collision Detection using Tight Error Bounds(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2015) Wang, Zhendong; Tang, Min; Tong, Ruofeng; Manocha, Dinesh; Stam, Jos and Mitra, Niloy J. and Xu, KunWe present a realtime and reliable continuous collision detection (CCD) algorithm between triangulated models that exploits the floating point hardware capability of current CPUs and GPUs. Our formulation is based on Bernstein Sign Classification that takes advantage of the geometry properties of Bernstein basis and Bézier curves to perform Boolean collision queries. We derive tight numerical error bounds on the computations and employ those bounds to design an accurate algorithm using finite-precision arithmetic. Compared with prior floatingpoint CCD algorithms, our approach eliminates all the false negatives and 90-95% of the false positives. We integrated our algorithm (TightCCD) with physically-based simulation system and observe speedups in collision queries of 5-15X compared with prior reliable CCD algorithms. Furthermore, we demonstrate its benefits in terms of improving the performance or robustness of cloth simulation systems.Item Brushables: Example-based Edge-aware Directional Texture Painting(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2015) Lukáč, Michal; Fišer, Jakub; Asente, Paul; Lu, Jingwan; Shechtman, Eli; Sýkora, Daniel; Stam, Jos and Mitra, Niloy J. and Xu, KunIn this paper we present Brushables-a novel approach to example-based painting that respects user-specified shapes at the global level and preserves textural details of the source image at the local level. We formulate the synthesis as a joint optimization problem that simultaneously synthesizes the interior and the boundaries of the region, transferring relevant content from the source to meaningful locations in the target. We also provide an intuitive interface to control both local and global direction of textural details in the synthesized image. A key advantage of our approach is that it enables a ''combing'' metaphor in which the user can incrementally modify the target direction field to achieve the desired look. Based on this, we implement an interactive texture painting tool capable of handling more complex textures than ever before, and demonstrate its versatility on difficult inputs including vegetation, textiles, hair and painting media.Item Guided Mesh Normal Filtering(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2015) Zhang, Wangyu; Deng, Bailin; Zhang, Juyong; Bouaziz, Sofien; Liu, Ligang; Stam, Jos and Mitra, Niloy J. and Xu, KunThe joint bilateral filter is a variant of the standard bilateral filter, where the range kernel is evaluated using a guidance signal instead of the original signal. It has been successfully applied to various image processing problems, where it provides more flexibility than the standard bilateral filter to achieve high quality results. On the other hand, its success is heavily dependent on the guidance signal, which should ideally provide a robust estimation about the features of the output signal. Such a guidance signal is not always easy to construct. In this paper, we propose a novel mesh normal filtering framework based on the joint bilateral filter, with applications in mesh denoising. Our framework is designed as a two-stage process: first, we apply joint bilateral filtering to the face normals, using a properly constructed normal field as the guidance; afterwards, the vertex positions are updated according to the filtered face normals. We compute the guidance normal on a face using a neighboring patch with the most consistent normal orientations, which provides a reliable estimation of the true normal even with a high-level of noise. The effectiveness of our approach is validated by extensive experimental results.Item Mesh Denoising using Extended ROF Model with L1 Fidelity(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2015) Wu, Xiaoqun; Zheng, Jianmin; Cai, Yiyu; Fu, Chi-Wing; Stam, Jos and Mitra, Niloy J. and Xu, KunThis paper presents a variational algorithm for feature-preserved mesh denoising. At the heart of the algorithm is a novel variational model composed of three components: fidelity, regularization and fairness, which are specifically designed to have their intuitive roles. In particular, the fidelity is formulated as an L1 data term, which makes the regularization process be less dependent on the exact value of outliers and noise. The regularization is formulated as the total absolute edge-lengthed supplementary angle of the dihedral angle, making the model capable of reconstructing meshes with sharp features. In addition, an augmented Lagrange method is provided to efficiently solve the proposed variational model. Compared to the prior art, the new algorithm has crucial advantages in handling large scale noise, noise along random directions, and different kinds of noise, including random impulsive noise, even in the presence of sharp features. Both visual and quantitative evaluation demonstrates the superiority of the new algorithm.Item FlexyFont: Learning Transferring Rules for Flexible Typeface Synthesis(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2015) Phan, Huy Quoc; Fu, Hongbo; Chan, Antoni B.; Stam, Jos and Mitra, Niloy J. and Xu, KunMaintaining consistent styles across glyphs is an arduous task in typeface design. In this work we introduce Flexy- Font, a flexible tool for synthesizing a complete typeface that has a consistent style with a given small set of glyphs. Motivated by a key fact that typeface designers often maintain a library of glyph parts to achieve a consistent typeface, we intend to learn part consistency between glyphs of different characters across typefaces. We take a part assembling approach by firstly decomposing the given glyphs into semantic parts and then assembling them according to learned sets of transferring rules to reconstruct the missing glyphs. To maintain style consistency, we represent the style of a font as a vector of pairwise part similarities. By learning a distribution over these feature vectors, we are able to predict the style of a novel typeface given only a few examples. We utilize a popular machine learning method as well as retrieval-based methods to quantitatively assess the performance of our feature vector, resulting in favorable results. We also present an intuitive interface that allows users to interactively create novel typefaces with ease. The synthesized fonts can be directly used in real-world design.Item Towards Automatic Band-Limited Procedural Shaders(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2015) Dorn, Jonathan; Barnes, Connelly; Lawrence, Jason; Weimer, Westley; Stam, Jos and Mitra, Niloy J. and Xu, KunProcedural shaders are a vital part of modern rendering systems. Despite their prevalence, however, procedural shaders remain sensitive to aliasing any time they are sampled at a rate below the Nyquist limit. Antialiasing is typically achieved through numerical techniques like supersampling or precomputing integrals stored in mipmaps. This paper explores the problem of analytically computing a band-limited version of a procedural shader as a continuous function of the sampling rate. There is currently no known way of analytically computing these integrals in general. We explore the conditions under which exact solutions are possible and develop several approximation strategies for when they are not. Compared to supersampling methods, our approach produces shaders that are less expensive to evaluate and closer to ground truth in many cases. Compared to mipmapping or precomputation, our approach produces shaders that support an arbitrary bandwidth parameter and require less storage. We evaluate our method on a range of spatially-varying shader functions, automatically producing antialiased versions that have comparable error to 4x4 multisampling but can be over an order of magnitude faster. While not complete, our approach is a promising first step toward this challenging goal and indicates a number of interesting directions for future work.Item DenseCut: Densely Connected CRFs for Realtime GrabCut(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2015) Cheng, Ming-Ming; Prisacariu, Victor Adrian; Zheng, Shuai; Torr, Philip H. S.; Rother, Carsten; Stam, Jos and Mitra, Niloy J. and Xu, KunFigure-ground segmentation from bounding box input, provided either automatically or manually, has been extremely popular in the last decade and influenced various applications. A lot of research has focused on highquality segmentation, using complex formulations which often lead to slow techniques, and often hamper practical usage. In this paper we demonstrate a very fast segmentation technique which still achieves very high quality results. We propose to replace the time consuming iterative refinement of global colour models in traditional GrabCut formulation by a densely connected CRF. To motivate this decision, we show that a dense CRF implicitly models unnormalized global colour models for foreground and background. Such relationship provides insightful analysis to bridge between dense CRF and GrabCut functional. We extensively evaluate our algorithm using two famous benchmarks. Our experimental results demonstrated that the proposed algorithm achieves an order of magnitude (10 ) speed-up with respect to the closest competitor, and at the same time achieves a considerably higher accuracy.Item EasyXplorer: A Flexible Visual Exploration Approach for Multivariate Spatial Data(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2015) Wu, Feiran; Chen, Guoning; Huang, Jin; Tao, Yubo; Chen, Wei; Stam, Jos and Mitra, Niloy J. and Xu, KunExploring multivariate spatial data attracts much attention in the visualization community. The main challenge lies in that automatic analysis techniques is insufficient in discovering complicated patterns with the perspective of human beings, while visualization techniques are incapable of accurately identifying the features of interest. This paper addresses this contradiction by enhancing automatic analysis techniques with human intelligence in an iterative visual exploration process. The integrated system, called EasyXplorer, provides a suite of intuitive clustering, dimension reduction, visual encoding and filtering widgets within 2D and 3D views, allowing an inexperienced user to visually explore and reason undiscovered features with several simple interactions. Case studies show the quality and scalability of our approach in quite challenging examples.Item Virtual Spherical Gaussian Lights for Real-time Glossy Indirect Illumination(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2015) Tokuyoshi, Yusuke; Stam, Jos and Mitra, Niloy J. and Xu, KunVirtual point lights (VPLs) are well established for real-time global illumination. However, this method suffers from spiky artifacts and flickering caused by singularities of VPLs, highly glossy materials, high-frequency textures, and discontinuous geometries. To avoid these artifacts, this paper introduces a virtual spherical Gaussian light (VSGL) which roughly represents a set of VPLs. For a VSGL, the total radiant intensity and positional distribution of VPLs are approximated using spherical Gaussians and a Gaussian distribution, respectively. Since this approximation can be computed using summations of VPL parameters, VSGLs can be dynamically generated using mipmapped reflective shadow maps. Our VSGL generation is simple and independent from any scene geometries. In addition, reflected radiance for a VSGL is calculated using an analytic formula. Hence, we are able to render one-bounce glossy interreflections at real-time frame rates with smaller artifacts.Item Dispersion-based Color Projection using Masked Prisms(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2015) Hostettler, Rafael; Habel, Ralf; Gross, Markus; Jarosz, Wojciech; Stam, Jos and Mitra, Niloy J. and Xu, KunWe present a method for projecting arbitrary color images using a white light source and an optical device with no colored components - consisting solely of one or two prisms and two transparent masks. When illuminated, the first mask creates structured white light that is then dispersed in the prism and attenuated by the second mask to create the color projection. We derive analytical expressions for the mask parameters from the physical components and validate our approach both in simulation and also demonstrate it on a wide variety of images using two different physical setups (one consisting of two inexpensive triangular prisms, and the other using a single rhombic prism). Furthermore, we show that optimizing the masks simultaneously enables obfuscating the image content, and provides a tradeoff between increased light throughput (by up to a factor of three) and maximum color saturation.Item Order-Independent Transparency for Programmable Deferred Shading Pipelines(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2015) Schollmeyer, Andre; Babanin, Andrey; Froehlich, Bernd; Stam, Jos and Mitra, Niloy J. and Xu, KunIn this paper, we present a flexible and efficient approach for the integration of order-independent transparency into a deferred shading pipeline. The intermediate buffers for storing fragments to be shaded are extended with a dynamic and memory-efficient storage for transparent fragments. The transparency of an object is not fixed and remains programmable until fragment processing, which allows for the implementation of advanced materials effects, interaction techniques or adaptive fade-outs. Traversing costs for shading the transparent fragments are greatly reduced by introducing a tile-based light-culling pass. During deferred shading, opaque and transparent fragments are shaded and composited in front-to-back order using the retrieved lighting information and a physically-based shading model. In addition, we discuss various configurations of the system and further enhancements. Our results show that the system performs at interactive frame rates even for complex scenarios.Item Object Completion using k-Sparse Optimization(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2015) Mavridis, Pavlos; Sipiran, Ivan; Andreadis, Anthousis; Papaioannou, Georgios; Stam, Jos and Mitra, Niloy J. and Xu, KunWe present a new method for the completion of partial globally-symmetric 3D objects, based on the detection of partial and approximate symmetries in the incomplete input dataset. In our approach, symmetry detection is formulated as a constrained sparsity maximization problem, which is solved efficiently using a robust RANSACbased optimizer. The detected partial symmetries are then reused iteratively, in order to complete the missing parts of the object. A global error relaxation method minimizes the accumulated alignment errors and a nonrigid registration approach applies local deformations in order to properly handle approximate symmetry. Unlike previous approaches, our method does not rely on the computation of features, it uniformly handles translational, rotational and reflectional symmetries and can provide plausible object completion results, even on challenging cases, where more than half of the target object is missing. We demonstrate our algorithm in the completion of 3D scans with varying levels of partiality and we show the applicability of our approach in the repair and completion of heavily eroded or incomplete cultural heritage objects.Item Evaluating the Quality of Face Alignment without Ground Truth(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2015) Sheng, Kekai; Dong, Weiming; Kong, Yan; Mei, Xing; Li, Jilin; Wang, Chengjie; Huang, Feiyue; Hu, Bao-Gang; Stam, Jos and Mitra, Niloy J. and Xu, KunThe study of face alignment has been an area of intense research in computer vision, with its achievements widely used in computer graphics applications. The performance of various face alignment methods is often imagedependent or somewhat random because of their own strategy. This study aims to develop a method that can select an input image with good face alignment results from many results produced by a single method or multiple ones. The task is challenging because different face alignment results need to be evaluated without any ground truth. This study addresses this problem by designing a feasible feature extraction scheme to measure the quality of face alignment results. The feature is then used in various machine learning algorithms to rank different face alignment results. Our experiments show that our method is promising for ranking face alignment results and is able to pick good face alignment results, which can enhance the overall performance of a face alignment method with a random strategy. We demonstrate the usefulness of our ranking-enhanced face alignment algorithm in two practical applications: face cartoon stylization and digital face makeup.Item A Suggestive Interface for Sketch-based Character Posing(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2015) Lv, Pei; Wang, Pengjie; Xu, Weiwei; Chai, Jinxiang; Zhang, Mingmin; Pan, Zhigeng; Xu, Mingliang; Stam, Jos and Mitra, Niloy J. and Xu, KunWe present a user-friendly suggestive interface for sketch-based character posing. Our interface provides suggestive information on the sketching canvas in succession by combining image retrieval technique with 3D character posing, while the user is drawing. The system highlights the canvas region where the user should draw on and constrains the user's sketches in a reasonable solution space. This is based on an e cient image descriptor, which is used to measure the distance between the user's sketch and 2D views of 3D poses. In order to achieve faster query response, local sensitive hashing is involved in our system. In addition, sampling-based optimization algorithm is adopted to synthesize and optimize the retrieved 3D pose to match the user's sketches the best. Experiments show that our interface can provide smooth suggestive information to improve the reality of sketching poses and shorten the time required for 3D posing.