20,946 research outputs found
Interactive Vegetation Rendering with Slicing and Blending
Detailed and interactive 3D rendering of vegetation is one of the challenges of traditional polygon-oriented computer graphics, due to large geometric complexity even of simple plants. In this paper we introduce a simplified image-based rendering approach based solely on alpha-blended textured polygons. The simplification is based on the limitations of human perception of complex geometry. Our approach renders dozens of detailed trees in real-time with off-the-shelf hardware, while providing significantly improved image quality over existing real-time techniques. The method is based on using ordinary mesh-based rendering for the solid parts of a tree, its trunk and limbs. The sparse parts of a tree, its twigs and leaves, are instead represented with a set of slices, an image-based representation. A slice is a planar layer, represented with an ordinary alpha or color-keyed texture; a set of parallel slices is a slicing. Rendering from an arbitrary viewpoint in a 360 degree circle around the center of a tree is achieved by blending between the nearest two slicings. In our implementation, only 6 slicings with 5 slices each are sufficient to visualize a tree for a moving or stationary observer with the perceptually similar quality as the original model
FlightGoggles: A Modular Framework for Photorealistic Camera, Exteroceptive Sensor, and Dynamics Simulation
FlightGoggles is a photorealistic sensor simulator for perception-driven
robotic vehicles. The key contributions of FlightGoggles are twofold. First,
FlightGoggles provides photorealistic exteroceptive sensor simulation using
graphics assets generated with photogrammetry. Second, it provides the ability
to combine (i) synthetic exteroceptive measurements generated in silico in real
time and (ii) vehicle dynamics and proprioceptive measurements generated in
motio by vehicle(s) in a motion-capture facility. FlightGoggles is capable of
simulating a virtual-reality environment around autonomous vehicle(s). While a
vehicle is in flight in the FlightGoggles virtual reality environment,
exteroceptive sensors are rendered synthetically in real time while all complex
extrinsic dynamics are generated organically through the natural interactions
of the vehicle. The FlightGoggles framework allows for researchers to
accelerate development by circumventing the need to estimate complex and
hard-to-model interactions such as aerodynamics, motor mechanics, battery
electrochemistry, and behavior of other agents. The ability to perform
vehicle-in-the-loop experiments with photorealistic exteroceptive sensor
simulation facilitates novel research directions involving, e.g., fast and
agile autonomous flight in obstacle-rich environments, safe human interaction,
and flexible sensor selection. FlightGoggles has been utilized as the main test
for selecting nine teams that will advance in the AlphaPilot autonomous drone
racing challenge. We survey approaches and results from the top AlphaPilot
teams, which may be of independent interest.Comment: Initial version appeared at IROS 2019. Supplementary material can be
found at https://flightgoggles.mit.edu. Revision includes description of new
FlightGoggles features, such as a photogrammetric model of the MIT Stata
Center, new rendering settings, and a Python AP
Progressive refinement rendering of implicit surfaces
The visualisation of implicit surfaces can be an inefficient task when such surfaces are complex and highly detailed. Visualising a surface by first converting it to a
polygon mesh may lead to an excessive polygon count. Visualising a surface by direct ray casting is often a slow procedure. In this paper we present a progressive refinement renderer for implicit surfaces that are Lipschitz continuous. The renderer first displays a low resolution estimate of what the final image is going to be and, as the computation progresses, increases the quality of this estimate at an interactive frame rate. This renderer provides a quick previewing facility that significantly reduces the design cycle of a new and complex implicit surface. The renderer is also capable of completing an image faster than a conventional implicit surface rendering algorithm based on ray casting
CIDI-Lung-Seg: A Single-Click Annotation Tool for Automatic Delineation of Lungs from CT Scans
Accurate and fast extraction of lung volumes from computed tomography (CT)
scans remains in a great demand in the clinical environment because the
available methods fail to provide a generic solution due to wide anatomical
variations of lungs and existence of pathologies. Manual annotation, current
gold standard, is time consuming and often subject to human bias. On the other
hand, current state-of-the-art fully automated lung segmentation methods fail
to make their way into the clinical practice due to their inability to
efficiently incorporate human input for handling misclassifications and praxis.
This paper presents a lung annotation tool for CT images that is interactive,
efficient, and robust. The proposed annotation tool produces an "as accurate as
possible" initial annotation based on the fuzzy-connectedness image
segmentation, followed by efficient manual fixation of the initial extraction
if deemed necessary by the practitioner. To provide maximum flexibility to the
users, our annotation tool is supported in three major operating systems
(Windows, Linux, and the Mac OS X). The quantitative results comparing our free
software with commercially available lung segmentation tools show higher degree
of consistency and precision of our software with a considerable potential to
enhance the performance of routine clinical tasks.Comment: 4 pages, 6 figures; to appear in the proceedings of 36th Annual
International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology
Society (EMBC 2014
Calipso: Physics-based Image and Video Editing through CAD Model Proxies
We present Calipso, an interactive method for editing images and videos in a
physically-coherent manner. Our main idea is to realize physics-based
manipulations by running a full physics simulation on proxy geometries given by
non-rigidly aligned CAD models. Running these simulations allows us to apply
new, unseen forces to move or deform selected objects, change physical
parameters such as mass or elasticity, or even add entire new objects that
interact with the rest of the underlying scene. In Calipso, the user makes
edits directly in 3D; these edits are processed by the simulation and then
transfered to the target 2D content using shape-to-image correspondences in a
photo-realistic rendering process. To align the CAD models, we introduce an
efficient CAD-to-image alignment procedure that jointly minimizes for rigid and
non-rigid alignment while preserving the high-level structure of the input
shape. Moreover, the user can choose to exploit image flow to estimate scene
motion, producing coherent physical behavior with ambient dynamics. We
demonstrate Calipso's physics-based editing on a wide range of examples
producing myriad physical behavior while preserving geometric and visual
consistency.Comment: 11 page
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