Sparse Volumetric Deformation

Volume rendering is becoming increasingly popular as applications require realistic solid shape representations with seamless texture mapping and accurate filtering. However rendering sparse volumetric data is difficult because of the limited memory and processing capabilities of current hardware. To address these limitations, the volumetric information can be stored at progressive resolutions in the hierarchical branches of a tree structure, and sampled according to the region of interest. This means that only a partial region of the full dataset is processed, and therefore massive volumetric scenes can be rendered efficiently. The problem with this approach is that it currently only supports static scenes. This is because it is difficult to accurately deform massive amounts of volume elements and reconstruct the scene hierarchy in real-time. Another problem is that deformation operations distort the shape where more than one volume element tries to occupy the same location, and similarly gaps occur where deformation stretches the elements further than one discrete location. It is also challenging to efficiently support sophisticated deformations at hierarchical resolutions, such as character skinning or physically based animation. These types of deformation are expensive and require a control structure (for example a cage or skeleton) that maps to a set of features to accelerate the deformation process. The problems with this technique are that the varying volume hierarchy reflects different feature sizes, and manipulating the features at the original resolution is too expensive; therefore the control structure must also hierarchically capture features according to the varying volumetric resolution. This thesis investigates the area of deforming and rendering massive amounts of dynamic volumetric content. The proposed approach efficiently deforms hierarchical volume elements without introducing artifacts and supports both ray casting and rasterization renderers. This enables light transport to be modeled both accurately and efficiently with applications in the fields of real-time rendering and computer animation. Sophisticated volumetric deformation, including character animation, is also supported in real-time. This is achieved by automatically generating a control skeleton which is mapped to the varying feature resolution of the volume hierarchy. The output deformations are demonstrated in massive dynamic volumetric scenes

Optical flow estimation via steered-L1 norm

Global variational methods for estimating optical flow are among the best performing methods due to the subpixel accuracy and the ‘fill-in’ effect they provide. The fill-in effect allows optical flow displacements to be estimated even in low and untextured areas of the image. The estimation of such displacements are induced by the smoothness term. The L1 norm provides a robust regularisation term for the optical flow energy function with a very good performance for edge-preserving. However this norm suffers from several issues, among these is the isotropic nature of this norm which reduces the fill-in effect and eventually the accuracy of estimation in areas near motion boundaries. In this paper we propose an enhancement to the L1 norm that improves the fill-in effect for this smoothness term. In order to do this we analyse the structure tensor matrix and use its eigenvectors to steer the smoothness term into components that are ‘orthogonal to’ and ‘aligned with’ image structures. This is done in primal-dual formulation. Results show a reduced end-point error and improved accuracy compared to the conventional L1 norm

Optical flow estimation via steered-L1 norm

Global variational methods for estimating optical flow are among the best performing methods due to the subpixel accuracy and the ‘fill-in’ effect they provide. The fill-in effect allows optical flow displacements to be estimated even in low and untextured areas of the image. The estimation of such displacements are induced by the smoothness term. The L1 norm provides a robust regularisation term for the optical flow energy function with a very good performance for edge-preserving. However this norm suffers from several issues, among these is the isotropic nature of this norm which reduces the fill-in effect and eventually the accuracy of estimation in areas near motion boundaries. In this paper we propose an enhancement to the L1 norm that improves the fill-in effect for this smoothness term. In order to do this we analyse the structure tensor matrix and use its eigenvectors to steer the smoothness term into components that are ‘orthogonal to’ and ‘aligned with’ image structures. This is done in primal-dual formulation. Results show a reduced end-point error and improved accuracy compared to the conventional L1 norm

New Geometric Data Structures for Collision Detection

We present new geometric data structures for collision detection and more, including: Inner Sphere Trees - the first data structure to compute the peneration volume efficiently. Protosphere - an new algorithm to compute space filling sphere packings for arbitrary objects. Kinetic AABBs - a bounding volume hierarchy that is optimal in the number of updates when the objects deform. Kinetic Separation-List - an algorithm that is able to perform continuous collision detection for complex deformable objects in real-time. Moreover, we present applications of these new approaches to hand animation, real-time collision avoidance in dynamic environments for robots and haptic rendering, including a user study that exploits the influence of the degrees of freedom in complex haptic interactions. Last but not least, we present a new benchmarking suite for both, peformance and quality benchmarks, and a theoretic analysis of the running-time of bounding volume-based collision detection algorithms

Volumetric cloud generation using a Chinese brush calligraphy style

Includes bibliographical references.Clouds are an important feature of any real or simulated environment in which the sky is visible. Their amorphous, ever-changing and illuminated features make the sky vivid and beautiful. However, these features increase both the complexity of real time rendering and modelling. It is difficult to design and build volumetric clouds in an easy and intuitive way, particularly if the interface is intended for artists rather than programmers. We propose a novel modelling system motivated by an ancient painting style, Chinese Landscape Painting, to address this problem. With the use of only one brush and one colour, an artist can paint a vivid and detailed landscape efficiently. In this research, we develop three emulations of a Chinese brush: a skeleton-based brush, a 2D texture footprint and a dynamic 3D footprint, all driven by the motion and pressure of a stylus pen. We propose a hybrid mapping to generate both the body and surface of volumetric clouds from the brush footprints. Our interface integrates these components along with 3D canvas control and GPU-based volumetric rendering into an interactive cloud modelling system. Our cloud modelling system is able to create various types of clouds occurring in nature. User tests indicate that our brush calligraphy approach is preferred to conventional volumetric cloud modelling and that it produces convincing 3D cloud formations in an intuitive and interactive fashion. While traditional modelling systems focus on surface generation of 3D objects, our brush calligraphy technique constructs the interior structure. This forms the basis of a new modelling style for objects with amorphous shape

FULL 3D RECONSTRUCTION OF DYNAMIC NON-RIGID SCENES: ACQUISITION AND ENHANCEMENT

Recent advances in commodity depth or 3D sensing technologies have enabled us to move closer to the goal of accurately sensing and modeling the 3D representations of complex dynamic scenes. Indeed, in domains such as virtual reality, security, surveillance and e-health, there is now a greater demand for aff ordable and flexible vision systems which are capable of acquiring high quality 3D reconstructions. Available commodity RGB-D cameras, though easily accessible, have limited fi eld-of-view, and acquire noisy and low-resolution measurements which restricts their direct usage in building such vision systems. This thesis targets these limitations and builds approaches around commodity 3D sensing technologies to acquire noise-free and feature preserving full 3D reconstructions of dynamic scenes containing, static or moving, rigid or non-rigid objects. A mono-view system based on a single RGB-D camera is incapable of acquiring full 360 degrees 3D reconstruction of a dynamic scene instantaneously. For this purpose, a multi-view system composed of several RGB-D cameras covering the whole scene is used. In the first part of this thesis, the domain of correctly aligning the information acquired from RGB-D cameras in a multi-view system to provide full and textured 3D reconstructions of dynamic scenes, instantaneously, is explored. This is achieved by solving the extrinsic calibration problem. This thesis proposes an extrinsic calibration framework which uses the 2D photometric and 3D geometric information, acquired with RGB-D cameras, according to their relative (in)accuracies, a ffected by the presence of noise, in a single weighted bi-objective optimization. An iterative scheme is also proposed, which estimates the parameters of noise model aff ecting both 2D and 3D measurements, and solves the extrinsic calibration problem simultaneously. Results show improvement in calibration accuracy as compared to state-of-art methods. In the second part of this thesis, the domain of enhancement of noisy and low-resolution 3D data acquired with commodity RGB-D cameras in both mono-view and multi-view systems is explored. This thesis extends the state-of-art in mono-view template-free recursive 3D data enhancement which targets dynamic scenes containing rigid-objects, and thus requires tracking only the global motions of those objects for view-dependent surface representation and fi ltering. This thesis proposes to target dynamic scenes containing non-rigid objects which introduces the complex requirements of tracking relatively large local motions and maintaining data organization for view-dependent surface representation. The proposed method is shown to be e ffective in handling non-rigid objects of changing topologies. Building upon the previous work, this thesis overcomes the requirement of data organization by proposing an approach based on view-independent surface representation. View-independence decreases the complexity of the proposed algorithm and allows it the flexibility to process and enhance noisy data, acquired with multiple cameras in a multi-view system, simultaneously. Moreover, qualitative and quantitative experimental analysis shows this method to be more accurate in removing noise to produce enhanced 3D reconstructions of non-rigid objects. Although, extending this method to a multi-view system would allow for obtaining instantaneous enhanced full 360 degrees 3D reconstructions of non-rigid objects, it still lacks the ability to explicitly handle low-resolution data. Therefore, this thesis proposes a novel recursive dynamic multi-frame 3D super-resolution algorithm together with a novel 3D bilateral total variation regularization to filter out the noise, recover details and enhance the resolution of data acquired from commodity cameras in a multi-view system. Results show that this method is able to build accurate, smooth and feature preserving full 360 degrees 3D reconstructions of the dynamic scenes containing non-rigid objects

Haptic Interaction with 3D oriented point clouds on the GPU

Real-time point-based rendering and interaction with virtual objects is gaining popularity and importance as di�erent haptic devices and technologies increasingly provide the basis for realistic interaction. Haptic Interaction is being used for a wide range of applications such as medical training, remote robot operators, tactile displays and video games. Virtual object visualization and interaction using haptic devices is the main focus; this process involves several steps such as: Data Acquisition, Graphic Rendering, Haptic Interaction and Data Modi�cation. This work presents a framework for Haptic Interaction using the GPU as a hardware accelerator, and includes an approach for enabling the modi�cation of data during interaction. The results demonstrate the limits and capabilities of these techniques in the context of volume rendering for haptic applications. Also, the use of dynamic parallelism as a technique to scale the number of threads needed from the accelerator according to the interaction requirements is studied allowing the editing of data sets of up to one million points at interactive haptic frame rates