A Morphological Approach to Volume Synthesis of Weathered Stones

Lack of considering aging phenomena observed frequently in the real world gives rise to unreal synthetic objects. Aging effects are viewed to play an important role in achieving seamless superposition of synthetic objects upon acquired natural scenes. Several research groups have noticed the importance of such effects, and recently reported attractive results. The primary target in this paper is weathering of stones. Stones are quite common building material; weathering also needs its specific phenomenological modeling method. Stone objects start to get eroded on their surface interacting with the open air, leading to bumpy surfaces and rounded corners. In order to simulate such effects visually, mathematical morphology (MM)-based volumetric metamorphosis is adopted. An effective morphological operator, termed weathering is devised by extending the conventional 3D opening, MM operator with stochastic structuring elements. Preliminary experiments are performed with simply-shaped stone objects to illustrate the effectiveness of the present technique