131 research outputs found
Implementing non-photorealistic rendreing enhancements with real-time performance
We describe quality and performance enhancements, which work in real-time, to all well-known Non-photorealistic (NPR) rendering styles for use in an interactive context. These include Comic rendering, Sketch rendering, Hatching and Painterly rendering, but we also attempt and justify a widening of the established definition of what is considered NPR. In the individual Chapters, we identify typical stylistic elements of the different NPR styles. We list problems that need to be solved in order to implement the various renderers. Standard solutions available in the literature are introduced and in all cases extended and optimised. In particular, we extend the lighting model of the comic renderer to include a specular component and introduce multiple inter-related but independent geometric approximations which greatly improve rendering performance. We implement two completely different solutions to random perturbation sketching, solve temporal coherence issues for coal sketching and find an unexpected use for 3D textures to implement hatch-shading. Textured brushes of painterly rendering are extended by properties such as stroke-direction and texture, motion, paint capacity, opacity and emission, making them more flexible and versatile. Brushes are also provided with a minimal amount of intelligence, so that they can help in maximising screen coverage of brushes. We furthermore devise a completely new NPR style, which we call super-realistic and show how sample images can be tweened in real-time to produce an image-based six degree-of-freedom renderer performing at roughly 450 frames per second. Performance values for our other renderers all lie between 10 and over 400 frames per second on homePC hardware, justifying our real-time claim. A large number of sample screen-shots, illustrations and animations demonstrate the visual fidelity of our rendered images. In essence, we successfully achieve our attempted goals of increasing the creative, expressive and communicative potential of individual NPR styles, increasing performance of most of them, adding original and interesting visual qualities, and exploring new techniques or existing ones in novel ways.KMBT_363Adobe Acrobat 9.54 Paper Capture Plug-i
Colour videos with depth : acquisition, processing and evaluation
The human visual system lets us perceive the world around us in three dimensions
by integrating evidence from depth cues into a coherent visual model of the world. The equivalent in computer vision and computer graphics are geometric models,
which provide a wealth of information about represented objects, such as depth and
surface normals. Videos do not contain this information, but only provide per-pixel
colour information. In this dissertation, I hence investigate a combination of videos
and geometric models: videos with per-pixel depth (also known as
RGBZ videos).
I consider the full life cycle of these videos: from their acquisition, via filtering and
processing, to stereoscopic display.
I propose two approaches to capture videos with depth. The first is a spatiotemporal
stereo matching approach based on the dual-cross-bilateral grid – a novel real-time
technique derived by accelerating a reformulation of an existing stereo matching
approach. This is the basis for an extension which incorporates temporal evidence in
real time, resulting in increased temporal coherence of disparity maps – particularly
in the presence of image noise.
The second acquisition approach is a sensor fusion system which combines data
from a noisy, low-resolution time-of-flight camera and a high-resolution colour
video camera into a coherent, noise-free video with depth. The system consists
of a three-step pipeline that aligns the video streams, efficiently removes and fills
invalid and noisy geometry, and finally uses a spatiotemporal filter to increase the
spatial resolution of the depth data and strongly reduce depth measurement noise.
I show that these videos with depth empower a range of video processing effects
that are not achievable using colour video alone. These effects critically rely on the
geometric information, like a proposed video relighting technique which requires
high-quality surface normals to produce plausible results. In addition, I demonstrate
enhanced non-photorealistic rendering techniques and the ability to synthesise
stereoscopic videos, which allows these effects to be applied stereoscopically.
These stereoscopic renderings inspired me to study stereoscopic viewing discomfort.
The result of this is a surprisingly simple computational model that predicts the
visual comfort of stereoscopic images. I validated this model using a perceptual
study, which showed that it correlates strongly with human comfort ratings. This
makes it ideal for automatic comfort assessment, without the need for costly and
lengthy perceptual studies
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