Foveated Path Tracing with Fast Reconstruction and Efficient Sample Distribution

Polunseuranta on tietokonegrafiikan piirtotekniikka, jota on käytetty pääasiassa ei-reaaliaikaisen realistisen piirron tekemiseen. Polunseuranta tukee luonnostaan monia muilla tekniikoilla vaikeasti saavutettavia todellisen valon ilmiöitä kuten heijastuksia ja taittumista. Reaaliaikainen polunseuranta on hankalaa polunseurannan suuren laskentavaatimuksen takia. Siksi nykyiset reaaliaikaiset polunseurantasysteemi tuottavat erittäin kohinaisia kuvia, jotka tyypillisesti suodatetaan jälkikäsittelykohinanpoisto-suodattimilla. Erittäin immersiivisiä käyttäjäkokemuksia voitaisiin luoda polunseurannalla, joka täyttäisi laajennetun todellisuuden vaatimukset suuresta resoluutiosta riittävän matalassa vasteajassa. Yksi mahdollinen ratkaisu näiden vaatimusten täyttämiseen voisi olla katsekeskeinen polunseuranta, jossa piirron resoluutiota vähennetään katseen reunoilla. Tämän johdosta piirron laatu on katseen reunoilla sekä harvaa että kohinaista, mikä asettaa suuren roolin lopullisen kuvan koostavalle suodattimelle. Tässä työssä esitellään ensimmäinen reaaliajassa toimiva regressionsuodatin. Suodatin on suunniteltu kohinaisille kuville, joissa on yksi polunseurantanäyte pikseliä kohden. Nopea suoritus saavutetaan tiileissä käsittelemällä ja nopealla sovituksen toteutuksella. Lisäksi työssä esitellään Visual-Polar koordinaattiavaruus, joka jakaa polunseurantanäytteet siten, että niiden jakauma seuraa silmän herkkyysmallia. Visual-Polar-avaruuden etu muihin tekniikoiden nähden on että se vähentää työmäärää sekä polunseurannassa että suotimessa. Nämä tekniikat esittelevät toimivan prototyypin katsekeskeisestä polunseurannasta, ja saattavat toimia tienraivaajina laajamittaiselle realistisen reaaliaikaisen polunseurannan käyttöönotolle.Photo-realistic offline rendering is currently done with path tracing, because it naturally produces many real-life light effects such as reflections, refractions and caustics. These effects are hard to achieve with other rendering techniques. However, path tracing in real time is complicated due to its high computational demand. Therefore, current real-time path tracing systems can only generate very noisy estimate of the final frame, which is then denoised with a post-processing reconstruction filter. A path tracing-based rendering system capable of filling the high resolution in the low latency requirements of mixed reality devices would generate a very immersive user experience. One possible solution for fulfilling these requirements could be foveated path tracing, wherein the rendering resolution is reduced in the periphery of the human visual system. The key challenge is that the foveated path tracing in the periphery is both sparse and noisy, placing high demands on the reconstruction filter. This thesis proposes the first regression-based reconstruction filter for path tracing that runs in real time. The filter is designed for highly noisy one sample per pixel inputs. The fast execution is accomplished with blockwise processing and fast implementation of the regression. In addition, a novel Visual-Polar coordinate space which distributes the samples according to the contrast sensitivity model of the human visual system is proposed. The specialty of Visual-Polar space is that it reduces both path tracing and reconstruction work because both of them can be done with smaller resolution. These techniques enable a working prototype of a foveated path tracing system and may work as a stepping stone towards wider commercial adoption of photo-realistic real-time path tracing

Sensorimotor embedding : a developmental approach to learning geometry

textA human infant facing the blooming, buzzing confusion of the senses grows up to be an adult with common-sense knowledge of geometry; this knowledge then allows her to describe the shapes of objects, the layouts of places, and the relative locations of things naturally and effortlessly. In robotics, such knowledge is usually built in by a human designer who needs to solve complex engineering problems of sensor calibration and inference. In contrast, this dissertation presents a model for how autonomous agents can form an understanding of geometry the same way infants do: by learning from early unstructured sensorimotor experience. Through a framework called sensorimotor embedding, an agent reconstructs knowledge of its own sensor structure, the local geometry of the world, and the pose of objects within the world. The validity of this knowledge is demonstrated directly through Procrustes analysis and indirectly by using it to solve the mountain car task with different morphologies. The dissertation demonstrates how sensorimotor embedding can serve as a robust approach for acquiring geometric knowledge.Computer Science

Perception-driven approaches to real-time remote immersive visualization

In remote immersive visualization systems, real-time 3D perception through RGB-D cameras, combined with modern Virtual Reality (VR) interfaces, enhances the user’s sense of presence in a remote scene through 3D reconstruction rendered in a remote immersive visualization system. Particularly, in situations when there is a need to visualize, explore and perform tasks in inaccessible environments, too hazardous or distant. However, a remote visualization system requires the entire pipeline from 3D data acquisition to VR rendering satisfies the speed, throughput, and high visual realism. Mainly when using point-cloud, there is a fundamental quality difference between the acquired data of the physical world and the displayed data because of network latency and throughput limitations that negatively impact the sense of presence and provoke cybersickness. This thesis presents state-of-the-art research to address these problems by taking the human visual system as inspiration, from sensor data acquisition to VR rendering. The human visual system does not have a uniform vision across the field of view; It has the sharpest visual acuity at the center of the field of view. The acuity falls off towards the periphery. The peripheral vision provides lower resolution to guide the eye movements so that the central vision visits all the interesting crucial parts. As a first contribution, the thesis developed remote visualization strategies that utilize the acuity fall-off to facilitate the processing, transmission, buffering, and rendering in VR of 3D reconstructed scenes while simultaneously reducing throughput requirements and latency. As a second contribution, the thesis looked into attentional mechanisms to select and draw user engagement to specific information from the dynamic spatio-temporal environment. It proposed a strategy to analyze the remote scene concerning the 3D structure of the scene, its layout, and the spatial, functional, and semantic relationships between objects in the scene. The strategy primarily focuses on analyzing the scene with models the human visual perception uses. It sets a more significant proportion of computational resources on objects of interest and creates a more realistic visualization. As a supplementary contribution, A new volumetric point-cloud density-based Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) metric is proposed to evaluate the introduced techniques. An in-depth evaluation of the presented systems, comparative examination of the proposed point cloud metric, user studies, and experiments demonstrated that the methods introduced in this thesis are visually superior while significantly reducing latency and throughput

Progressive transmission and rendering of foveated volume data

Master'sMASTER OF SCIENC

TOWARDS A COMPUTATIONAL MODEL OF RETINAL STRUCTURE AND BEHAVIOR

Human vision is our most important sensory system, allowing us to perceive our surroundings. It is an extremely complex process that starts with light entering the eye and ends inside of the brain, with most of its mechanisms still to be explained. When we observe a scene, the optics of the eye focus an image on the retina, where light signals are processed and sent all the way to the visual cortex of the brain, enabling our visual sensation. The progress of retinal research, especially on the topography of photoreceptors, is often tied to the progress of retinal imaging systems. The latest adaptive optics techniques have been essential for the study of the photoreceptors and their spatial characteristics, leading to discoveries that challenge the existing theories on color sensation. The organization of the retina is associated with various perceptive phenomena, some of them are straightforward and strictly related to visual performance like visual acuity or contrast sensitivity, but some of them are more difficult to analyze and test and can be related to the submosaics of the three classes of cone photoreceptors, like how the huge interpersonal differences between the ratio of different cone classes result in negligible differences in color sensation, suggesting the presence of compensation mechanisms in some stage of the visual system. In this dissertation will be discussed and addressed issues regarding the spatial organization of the photoreceptors in the human retina. A computational model has been developed, organized into a modular pipeline of extensible methods each simulating a different stage of visual processing. It does so by creating a model of spatial distribution of cones inside of a retina, then applying descriptive statistics for each photoreceptor to contribute to the creation of a graphical representation, based on a behavioral model that determines the absorption of photoreceptors. These apparent color stimuli are reconstructed in a representation of the observed scene. The model allows the testing of different parameters regulating the photoreceptor's topography, in order to formulate hypothesis on the perceptual differences arising from variations in spatial organization

Visual Analysis of Popping in Progressive Visualization

Progressive visualization allows users to examine intermediate results while they are further refined in the background. This makes them increasingly popular when dealing with large data and computationally expensive tasks. The characteristics of how preliminary visualizations evolve over time are crucial for efficient analysis; in particular unexpected disruptive changes betweeniterations can significantly hamper the user experience. This paper proposes a visualization framework to analyze the refinement behavior of progressive visualization. We particularly focus on sudden significant changes between the iterations, which we denote as popping artifacts, in reference to undesirable visual effects in the context of level of detail representations in computergraphics. Our visualization approach conveys where in image space and when during the refinement popping artifacts occur. It allows to compare across different runs of stochastic processes, and supports parameter studies for gaining further insights and tuning the algorithms under consideration. We demonstrate the application of our framework and its effectiveness via twodiverse use cases with underlying stochastic processes: adaptive image space sampling, and the generation of grid layouts

Enhancing Visual and Gestural Fidelity for Effective Virtual Environments

A challenge for the virtual reality (VR) industry is facing is that VR is not immersive enough to make people feel a genuine sense of presence: the low frame rate leads to dizziness and the lack of human body visualization limits the human-computer interaction. In this dissertation, I present our research on enhancing visual and gestural fidelity in the virtual environment. First, I present a new foveated rendering technique: Kernel Foveated Rendering (KFR), which parameterizes foveated rendering by embedding polynomial kernel functions in log-polar space. This GPU-driven technique uses parameterized foveation that mimics the distribution of photoreceptors in the human retina. I present a two-pass kernel foveated rendering pipeline that maps well onto modern GPUs. I have carried out user studies to empirically identify the KFR parameters and have observed a 2.8x-3.2x speedup in rendering on 4K displays. Second, I explore the rendering acceleration through foveation for 4D light fields, which captures both the spatial and angular rays, thus enabling free-viewpoint rendering and custom selection of the focal plane. I optimize the KFR algorithm by adjusting the weight of each slice in the light field, so that it automatically selects the optimal foveation parameters for different images according to the gaze position. I have validated our approach on the rendering of light fields by carrying out both quantitative experiments and user studies. Our method achieves speedups of 3.47x-7.28x for different levels of foveation and different rendering resolutions. Thirdly, I present a simple yet effective technique for further reducing the cost of foveated rendering by leveraging ocular dominance - the tendency of the human visual system to prefer scene perception from one eye over the other. Our new approach, eye-dominance-guided foveated rendering (EFR), renders the scene at a lower foveation level (with higher detail) for the dominant eye than the non-dominant eye. Compared with traditional foveated rendering, EFR can be expected to provide superior rendering performance while preserving the same level of perceived visual quality. Finally, I present an approach to use an end-to-end convolutional neural network, which consists of a concatenation of an encoder and a decoder, to reconstruct a 3D model of a human hand from a single RGB image. Previous research work on hand mesh reconstruction suffers from the lack of training data. To train networks with full supervision, we fit a parametric hand model to 3D annotations, and we train the networks with the RGB image with the fitted parametric model as the supervision. Our approach leads to significantly improved quality compared to state-of-the-art hand mesh reconstruction techniques