EG 2016 - Full Papers - CGF 35-Issue 2

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Space-Time Co-Segmentation of Articulated Point Cloud Sequences
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Yuan, Qing; Li, Guiqing; Xu, Kai; Chen, Xudong; Huang, Hui; Joaquim Jorge and Ming Lin
Consistent segmentation is to the center of many applications based on dynamic geometric data. Directly segmenting a raw 3D point cloud sequence is a challenging task due to the low data quality and large inter-frame variation across the whole sequence. We propose a local-to-global approach to co-segment point cloud sequences of articulated objects into near-rigid moving parts. Our method starts from a per-frame point clustering, derived from a robust voting-based trajectory analysis. The local segments are then progressively propagated to the neighboring frames with a cut propagation operation, and further merged through all frames using a novel space-time segment grouping technqiue, leading to a globally consistent and compact segmentation of the entire articulated point cloud sequence. Such progressive propagating and merging, in both space and time dimensions, makes our co-segmentation algorithm especially robust in handling noise, occlusions and pose/view variations that are usually associated with raw scan data.
Learning 3D Deformation of Animals from 2D Images
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Kanazawa, Angjoo; Kovalsky, Shahar; Basri, Ronen; Jacobs, David; Joaquim Jorge and Ming Lin
Understanding how an animal can deform and articulate is essential for a realistic modification of its 3D model. In this paper, we show that such information can be learned from user-clicked 2D images and a template 3D model of the target animal. We present a volumetric deformation framework that produces a set of new 3D models by deforming a template 3D model according to a set of user-clicked images. Our framework is based on a novel locally-bounded deformation energy, where every local region has its own stiffness value that bounds how much distortion is allowed at that location. We jointly learn the local stiffness bounds as we deform the template 3D mesh to match each user-clicked image. We show that this seemingly complex task can be solved as a sequence of convex optimization problems. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on cats and horses, which are highly deformable and articulated animals. Our framework produces new 3D models of animals that are significantly more plausible than methods without learned stiffness.
Anisotropic Diffusion Descriptors
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Boscaini, Davide; Masci, Jonathan; Rodolà, Emanuele; Bronstein, Michael M.; Cremers, Daniel; Joaquim Jorge and Ming Lin
Spectral methods have recently gained popularity in many domains of computer graphics and geometry processing, especially shape processing, computation of shape descriptors, distances, and correspondence. Spectral geometric structures are intrinsic and thus invariant to isometric deformations, are efficiently computed, and can be constructed on shapes in different representations. A notable drawback of these constructions, however, is that they are isotropic, i.e., insensitive to direction. In this paper, we show how to construct direction-sensitive spectral feature descriptors using anisotropic diffusion on meshes and point clouds. The core of our construction are directed local kernels acting similarly to steerable filters, which are learned in a task-specific manner. Remarkably, while being intrinsic, our descriptors allow to disambiguate reflection symmetries. We show the application of anisotropic descriptors for problems of shape correspondence on meshes and point clouds, achieving results significantly better than state-of-the-art methods.
Buoyancy Optimization for Computational Fabrication
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Wang, Lingfeng; Whiting, Emily; Joaquim Jorge and Ming Lin
This paper introduces a design and fabrication pipeline for creating floating forms. Our method optimizes for buoyant equilibrium and stability of complex 3D shapes, applying a voxel-carving technique to control the mass distribution. The resulting objects achieve a desired floating pose defined by a user-specified waterline height and orientation. In order to enlarge the feasible design space, we explore novel ways to load the interior of a design using prefabricated components and casting techniques. 3D printing is employed for high-precision fabrication. For larger scale designs we introduce a method for stacking lasercut planar pieces to create 3D objects in a quick and economic manner. We demonstrate fabricated designs of complex shape in a variety of floating poses.
Near-Instant Capture of High-Resolution Facial Geometry and Reflectance
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Fyffe, Graham; Graham, Paul; Tunwattanapong, Borom; Ghosh, Abhijeet; Debevec, Paul; Joaquim Jorge and Ming Lin
We present a near-instant method for acquiring facial geometry and reflectance using a set of commodity DSLR cameras and flashes. Our setup consists of twenty-four cameras and six flashes which are fired in rapid succession with subsets of the cameras. Each camera records only a single photograph and the total capture time is less than the 67ms blink reflex. The cameras and flashes are specially arranged to produce an even distribution of specular highlights on the face. We employ this set of acquired images to estimate diffuse color, specular intensity, specular exponent, and surface orientation at each point on the face. We further refine the facial base geometry obtained from multi-view stereo using estimated diffuse and specular photometric information. This allows final submillimeter surface mesostructure detail to be obtained via shape-from-specularity. The final system uses commodity components and produces models suitable for authoring high-quality digital human characters.
Interactive Videos: Plausible Video Editing using Sparse Structure Points
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Chang, Chia-Sheng; Chu, Hung-Kuo; Mitra, Niloy J.; Joaquim Jorge and Ming Lin
Video remains the method of choice for capturing temporal events. However, without access to the underlying 3D scene models, it remains difficult to make object level edits in a single video or across multiple videos. While it may be possible to explicitly reconstruct the 3D geometries to facilitate these edits, such a workflow is cumbersome, expensive, and tedious. In this work, we present a much simpler workflow to create plausible editing and mixing of raw video footage using only sparse structure points (SSP) directly recovered from the raw sequences. First, we utilize user-scribbles to structure the point representations obtained using structure-from-motion on the input videos. The resultant structure points, even when noisy and sparse, are then used to enable various video edits in 3D, including view perturbation, keyframe animation, object duplication and transfer across videos, etc. Specifically, we describe how to synthesize object images from new views adopting a novel image-based rendering technique using the SSPs as proxy for the missing 3D scene information. We propose a structure-preserving image warping on multiple input frames adaptively selected from object video, followed by a spatio-temporally coherent image stitching to compose the final object image. Simple planar shadows and depth maps are synthesized for objects to generate plausible video sequence mimicking real-world interactions. We demonstrate our system on a variety of input videos to produce complex edits, which are otherwise difficult to achieve.
Structure-adaptive Shape Editing for Man-made Objects
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Fu, Qiang; Chen, Xiaowu; Su, Xiaoyu; Li, Jia; Fu, Hongbo; Joaquim Jorge and Ming Lin
One of the challenging problems for shape editing is to adapt shapes with diversified structures for various editing needs. In this paper we introduce a shape editing approach that automatically adapts the structure of a shape being edited with respect to user inputs. Given a category of shapes, our approach first classifies them into groups based on the constituent parts. The group-sensitive priors, including both inter-group and intra-group priors, are then learned through statistical structure analysis and multivariate regression. By using these priors, the inherent characteristics and typical variations of shape structures can be well captured. Based on such group-sensitive priors, we propose a framework for real-time shape editing, which adapts the structure of shape to continuous user editing operations. Experimental results show that the proposed approach is capable of both structure-preserving and structure-varying shape editing.
Large Scale Terrain Generation from Tectonic Uplift and Fluvial Erosion
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Cordonnier, Guillaume; Braun, Jean; Cani, Marie-Paule; Benes, Bedrich; Galin, Éric; Peytavie, Adrien; Guérin, Éric; Joaquim Jorge and Ming Lin
At large scale, landscapes result from the combination of two major processes: tectonics which generate the main relief through crust uplift, and weather which accounts for erosion. This paper presents the first method in computer graphics that combines uplift and hydraulic erosion to generate visually plausible terrains. Given a user-painted uplift map, we generate a stream graph over the entire domain embedding elevation information and stream flow. Our approach relies on the stream power equation introduced in geology for hydraulic erosion. By combining crust uplift and stream power erosion we generate large realistic terrains at a low computational cost. Finally, we convert this graph into a digital elevation model by blending landform feature kernels whose parameters are derived from the information in the graph. Our method gives high-level control over the large scale dendritic structures of the resulting river networks, watersheds, and mountains ridges.
Regularizing Image Reconstruction for Gradient-Domain Rendering with Feature Patches
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Manzi, Marco; Vicini, Delio; Zwicker, Matthias; Joaquim Jorge and Ming Lin
We present a novel algorithm to reconstruct high-quality images from sampled pixels and gradients in gradient-domain rendering. Our approach extends screened Poisson reconstruction by adding additional regularization constraints. Our key idea is to exploit local patches in feature images, which contain per-pixels normals, textures, position, etc., to formulate these constraints. We describe a GPU implementation of our approach that runs on the order of seconds on megapixel images. We demonstrate a significant improvement in image quality over screened Poisson reconstruction under the L1 norm. Because we adapt the regularization constraints to the noise level in the input, our algorithm is consistent and converges to the ground truth.
Single Image Weathering via Exemplar Propagation
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Iizuka, Satoshi; Endo, Yuki; Kanamori, Yoshihiro; Mitani, Jun; Joaquim Jorge and Ming Lin
This paper presents an efficient approach for generating weathering effects with detailed appearance variations in a single image. Previous approaches merely change chroma or reflectance of weathered objects, which is not sufficient for materials with detailed shading and texture variations, such as growing moss and peeling plaster. Our method propagates such detailed features via seamless patch-based synthesis driven by weathering degree distribution. Unlike previous methods, the weathering degrees are calculated efficiently using Radial Basis Functions even for materials with wide color variations. We use graph cut-based optimization to identify the most weathered region as a ''weathering exemplar'', from which we sample weathering patches. We demonstrate our method enables us to generate various types of detailed weathering effects interactively.
Animation Setup Transfer for 3D Characters
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Avril, Quentin; Ghafourzadeh, Donya; Ramachandran, Srinivasan; Fallahdoust, Sahel; Ribet, Sarah; Dionne, Olivier; Lasa, Martin de; Paquette, Eric; Joaquim Jorge and Ming Lin
We present a general method for transferring skeletons and skinning weights between characters with distinct mesh topologies. Our pipeline takes as inputs a source character rig (consisting of a mesh, a transformation hierarchy of joints, and skinning weights) and a target character mesh. From these inputs, we compute joint locations and orientations that embed the source skeleton in the target mesh, as well as skinning weights to bind the target geometry to the new skeleton. Our method consists of two key steps. We first compute the geometric correspondence between source and target meshes using a semi-automatic method relying on a set of markers. The resulting geometric correspondence is then used to formulate attribute transfer as an energy minimization and filtering problem. We demonstrate our approach on a variety of source and target bipedal characters, varying in mesh topology and morphology. Several examples demonstrate that the target characters behave well when animated with either forward or inverse kinematics. Via these examples, we show that our method preserves subtle artistic variations; spatial relationships between geometry and joints, as well as skinning weight details, are accurately maintained. Our proposed pipeline opens up many exciting possibilities to quickly animate novel characters by reusing existing production assets.
Geometry and Attribute Compression for Voxel Scenes
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Dado, Bas; Kol, Timothy R.; Bauszat, Pablo; Thiery, Jean-Marc; Eisemann, Elmar; Joaquim Jorge and Ming Lin
Voxel-based approaches are today's standard to encode volume data. Recently, directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) were successfully used for compressing sparse voxel scenes as well, but they are restricted to a single bit of (geometry) information per voxel. We present a method to compress arbitrary data, such as colors, normals, or reflectance information. By decoupling geometry and voxel data via a novel mapping scheme, we are able to apply the DAG principle to encode the topology, while using a palette-based compression for the voxel attributes, leading to a drastic memory reduction. Our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art techniques and is well-suited for GPU architectures. We achieve real-time performance on commodity hardware for colored scenes with up to 17 hierarchical levels (a 128K3 voxel resolution), which are stored fully in core.
Smooth Image Sequences for Data-driven Morphing
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Averbuch-Elor, Hadar; Cohen-Or, Daniel; Kopf, Johannes; Joaquim Jorge and Ming Lin
Smoothness is a quality that feels aesthetic and pleasing to the human eye. We present an algorithm for finding ''as-smoothas- possible'' sequences in image collections. In contrast to previous work, our method does not assume that the images show a common 3D scene, but instead may depict different object instances with varying deformations, and significant variation in lighting, texture, and color appearance. Our algorithm does not rely on a notion of camera pose, view direction, or 3D representation of an underlying scene, but instead directly optimizes the smoothness of the apparent motion of local point matches among the collection images. We increase the smoothness of our sequences by performing a global similarity transform alignment, as well as localized geometric wobble reduction and appearance stabilization. Our technique gives rise to a new kind of image morphing algorithm, in which the in-between motion is derived in a data-driven manner from a smooth sequence of real images without any user intervention. This new type of morph can go far beyond the ability of traditional techniques. We also demonstrate that our smooth sequences allow exploring large image collections in a stable manner.
Improved Surface Quality in 3D Printing by Optimizing the Printing Direction
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Wang, Weiming; Zanni, Cédric; Kobbelt, Leif; Joaquim Jorge and Ming Lin
We present a pipeline of algorithms that decomposes a given polygon model into parts such that each part can be 3D printed with high (outer) surface quality. For this we exploit the fact that most 3D printing technologies have an anisotropic resolution and hence the surface smoothness varies significantly with the orientation of the surface. Our pipeline starts by segmenting the input surface into patches such that their normals can be aligned perpendicularly to the printing direction. A 3D Voronoi diagram is computed such that the intersections of the Voronoi cells with the surface approximate these surface patches. The intersections of the Voronoi cells with the input model's volume then provide an initial decomposition. We further present an algorithm to compute an assembly order for the parts and generate connectors between them. A post processing step further optimizes the seams between segments to improve the visual quality. We run our pipeline on a wide range of 3D models and experimentally evaluate the obtained improvements in terms of numerical, visual, and haptic quality.
Compressed Multiresolution Hierarchies for High-Quality Precomputed Shadows
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Scandolo, Leonardo; Bauszat, Pablo; Eisemann, Elmar; Joaquim Jorge and Ming Lin
The quality of shadow mapping is traditionally limited by texture resolution. We present a novel lossless compression scheme for high-resolution shadow maps based on precomputed multiresolution hierarchies. Traditional multiresolution trees can compactly represent homogeneous regions of shadow maps at coarser levels, but require many nodes for fine details. By conservatively adapting the depth map, we can significantly reduce the tree complexity. Our proposed method offers high compression rates, avoids quantization errors, exploits coherency along all data dimensions, and is well-suited for GPU architectures. Our approach can be applied for coherent shadow maps as well, enabling several applications, including high-quality soft shadows and dynamic lights moving on fixed-trajectories.
Fast and Robust Inversion-Free Shape Manipulation
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Liu, Tiantian; Gao, Ming; Zhu, Lifeng; Sifakis, Eftychios; Kavan, Ladislav; Joaquim Jorge and Ming Lin
We present a shape manipulation technique capable of producing deformations of 2D and 3D meshes, guaranteeing that no elements will be inverted. We achieve this by augmenting the quadratic ex-rotated elastic energy with additional convex terms that penalize the presence of inverted elements. Using a schedule of increasing penalty coefficients, we efficiently and robustly converge to an inversion free state by solving a sequence of unconstrained convex minimization problems. This process can be interpreted as a special purpose Semi-Definite Programming (SDP) solver. We demonstrate that our method outperforms solvers used in previous work, including commercial-grade SDP software (MOSEK). As an additional benefit, our method also converges to the solution via a more intuitive path, which can be used for quick preview. We demonstrate the efficacy of our scheme in a number of 2D and 3D shapes undergoing moderate to drastic deformation.
Multisampling Compressive Video Spectroscopy
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Jeon, Daniel S.; Choi, Inchang; Kim, Min H.; Joaquim Jorge and Ming Lin
The coded aperture snapshot spectral imaging (CASSI) architecture has been employed widely for capturing hyperspectral video. Despite allowing concurrent capture of hyperspectral video, spatial modulation in CASSI sacrifices image resolution significantly while reconstructing spectral projection via sparse sampling. Several multiview alternatives have been proposed to handle this low spatial resolution problem and improve measurement accuracy, for instance, by adding a translation stage for the coded aperture or changing the static coded aperture with a digital micromirror device for dynamic modulation. Stateof- the-art solutions enhance spatial resolution significantly but are incapable of capturing video using CASSI. In this paper, we present a novel compressive coded aperture imaging design that increases spatial resolution while capturing 4D hyperspectral video of dynamic scenes. We revise the traditional CASSI design to allow for multiple sampling of the randomness of spatial modulation in a single frame. We demonstrate that our compressive video spectroscopy approach yields enhanced spatial resolution and consistent measurements, compared with the traditional CASSI design.
SMARTCANVAS: Context-inferred Interpretation of Sketches for Preparatory Design Studies
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Zheng, Youyi; Liu, Han; Dorsey, Julie; Mitra, Niloy J.; Joaquim Jorge and Ming Lin
In early or preparatory design stages, an architect or designer sketches out rough ideas, not only about the object or structure being considered, but its relation to its spatial context. This is an iterative process, where the sketches are not only the primary means for testing and refining ideas, but also for communicating among a design team and to clients. Hence, sketching is the preferred media for artists and designers during the early stages of design, albeit with a major drawback: sketches are 2D and effects such as view perturbations or object movement are not supported, thereby inhibiting the design process. We present an interactive system that allows for the creation of a 3D abstraction of a designed space, built primarily by sketching in 2D within the context of an anchoring design or photograph. The system is progressive in the sense that the interpretations are refined as the user continues sketching. As a key technical enabler, we reformulate the sketch interpretation process as a selection optimization from a set of context-generated canvas planes in order to retrieve a regular arrangement of planes. We demonstrate our system (available at http:/geometry.cs.ucl.ac.uk/projects/2016/smartcanvas/) with a wide range of sketches and design studies.
Narrow Band FLIP for Liquid Simulations
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Ferstl, Florian; Ando, Ryoichi; Wojtan, Chris; Westermann, Rüdiger; Thuerey, Nils; Joaquim Jorge and Ming Lin
The Fluid Implicit Particle method (FLIP) for liquid simulations uses particles to reduce numerical dissipation and provide important visual cues for events like complex splashes and small-scale features near the liquid surface. Unfortunately, FLIP simulations can be computationally expensive, because they require a dense sampling of particles to fill the entire liquid volume. Furthermore, the vast majority of these FLIP particles contribute nothing to the fluid's visual appearance, especially for larger volumes of liquid. We present a method that only uses FLIP particles within a narrow band of the liquid surface, while efficiently representing the remaining inner volume on a regular grid. We show that a naïve realization of this idea introduces unstable and uncontrollable energy fluctuations, and we propose a novel coupling scheme between FLIP particles and regular grid which overcomes this problem. Our method drastically reduces the particle count and simulation times while yielding results that are nearly indistinguishable from regular FLIP simulations. Our approach is easy to integrate into any existing FLIP implementation.
A Practical and Controllable Hair and Fur Model for Production Path Tracing
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Chiang, Matt Jen-Yuan; Bitterli, Benedikt; Tappan, Chuck; Burley, Brent; Joaquim Jorge and Ming Lin
We present an energy-conserving fiber shading model for hair and fur that is efficient enough for path tracing. Our model adopts a near-field formulation to avoid the expensive integral across the fiber, accounts for all high order internal reflection events with a single lobe, and proposes a novel, closed-form distribution for azimuthal roughness based on the logistic distribution. Additionally, we derive, through simulation, a parameterization that relates intuitive user controls such as multiple-scattering albedo and isotropic cylinder roughness to the underlying physical parameters.

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