2,576 research outputs found
VolumeEVM: A new surface/volume integrated model
Volume visualization is a very active research area in the field of scien-tific
visualization. The Extreme Vertices Model (EVM) has proven to be
a complete intermediate model to visualize and manipulate volume data
using a surface rendering approach. However, the ability to integrate the
advantages of surface rendering approach with the superiority in visual exploration
of the volume rendering would actually produce a very complete
visualization and edition system for volume data. Therefore, we decided
to define an enhanced EVM-based model which incorporates the volumetric
information required to achieved a nearly direct volume visualization
technique. Thus, VolumeEVM was designed maintaining the same EVM-based
data structure plus a sorted list of density values corresponding to
the EVM-based VoIs interior voxels. A function which relates interior
voxels of the EVM with the set of densities was mandatory to be defined.
This report presents the definition of this new surface/volume integrated
model based on the well known EVM encoding and propose implementations
of the main software-based direct volume rendering techniques
through the proposed model.Postprint (published version
An Overview of Rendering from Volume Data --- including Surface and Volume Rendering
Volume rendering is a title often ambiguously used in science. One meaning often quoted is: `to render any three volume dimensional data set'; however, within this categorisation `surface rendering'' is contained. Surface rendering is a technique for visualising a geometric representation of a surface from a three dimensional volume data set. A more correct definition of Volume Rendering would only incorporate the direct visualisation of volumes, without the use of intermediate surface geometry representations. Hence we state: `Volume Rendering is the Direct Visualisation of any three dimensional Volume data set; without the use of an intermediate geometric representation for isosurfaces'; `Surface Rendering is the Visualisation of a surface, from a geometric approximation of an isosurface, within a Volume data set'; where an isosurface is a surface formed from a cross connection of data points, within a volume, of equal value or density. This paper is an overview of both Surface Rendering and Volume Rendering techniques. Surface Rendering mainly consists of contouring lines over data points and triangulations between contours. Volume rendering methods consist of ray casting techniques that allow the ray to be cast from the viewing plane into the object and the transparency, opacity and colour calculated for each cell; the rays are often cast until an opaque object is `hit' or the ray exits the volume
Three architectures for volume rendering
Volume rendering is a key technique in scientific visualization that lends itself to significant exploitable parallelism. The high computational demands of real-time volume rendering and continued technological advances in the area of VLSI give impetus to the development of special-purpose volume rendering architectures. This paper presents and characterizes three recently developed volume rendering engines which are based on the ray-casting method. A taxonomy of the algorithmic variants of ray-casting and details of each ray-casting architecture are discussed. The paper then compares the machine features and provides an outlook on future developments in the area of volume rendering hardware
Sphere-Guided Training of Neural Implicit Surfaces
In recent years, surface modeling via neural implicit functions has become
one of the main techniques for multi-view 3D reconstruction. However, the
state-of-the-art methods rely on the implicit functions to model an entire
volume of the scene, leading to reduced reconstruction fidelity in the areas
with thin objects or high-frequency details. To address that, we present a
method for jointly training neural implicit surfaces alongside an auxiliary
explicit shape representation, which acts as surface guide. In our approach,
this representation encapsulates the surface region of the scene and enables us
to boost the efficiency of the implicit function training by only modeling the
volume in that region. We propose using a set of learnable spherical primitives
as a learnable surface guidance since they can be efficiently trained alongside
the neural surface function using its gradients. Our training pipeline consists
of iterative updates of the spheres' centers using the gradients of the
implicit function and then fine-tuning the latter to the updated surface region
of the scene. We show that such modification to the training procedure can be
plugged into several popular implicit reconstruction methods, improving the
quality of the results over multiple 3D reconstruction benchmarks
Disparity map generation based on trapezoidal camera architecture for multiview video
Visual content acquisition is a strategic functional block of any visual system. Despite its wide possibilities,
the arrangement of cameras for the acquisition of good quality visual content for use in multi-view video
remains a huge challenge. This paper presents the mathematical description of trapezoidal camera
architecture and relationships which facilitate the determination of camera position for visual content
acquisition in multi-view video, and depth map generation. The strong point of Trapezoidal Camera
Architecture is that it allows for adaptive camera topology by which points within the scene, especially the
occluded ones can be optically and geometrically viewed from several different viewpoints either on the
edge of the trapezoid or inside it. The concept of maximum independent set, trapezoid characteristics, and
the fact that the positions of cameras (with the exception of few) differ in their vertical coordinate
description could very well be used to address the issue of occlusion which continues to be a major
problem in computer vision with regards to the generation of depth map
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
CAD2Render: A Modular Toolkit for GPU-accelerated Photorealistic Synthetic Data Generation for the Manufacturing Industry
The use of computer vision for product and assembly quality control is
becoming ubiquitous in the manufacturing industry. Lately, it is apparent that
machine learning based solutions are outperforming classical computer vision
algorithms in terms of performance and robustness. However, a main drawback is
that they require sufficiently large and labeled training datasets, which are
often not available or too tedious and too time consuming to acquire. This is
especially true for low-volume and high-variance manufacturing. Fortunately, in
this industry, CAD models of the manufactured or assembled products are
available. This paper introduces CAD2Render, a GPU-accelerated synthetic data
generator based on the Unity High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP). CAD2Render
is designed to add variations in a modular fashion, making it possible for high
customizable data generation, tailored to the needs of the industrial use case
at hand. Although CAD2Render is specifically designed for manufacturing use
cases, it can be used for other domains as well. We validate CAD2Render by
demonstrating state of the art performance in two industrial relevant setups.
We demonstrate that the data generated by our approach can be used to train
object detection and pose estimation models with a high enough accuracy to
direct a robot. The code for CAD2Render is available at
https://github.com/EDM-Research/CAD2Render.Comment: Accepted at the Workshop on Photorealistic Image and Environment
Synthesis for Computer Vision (PIES-CV) at WACV2
Feature selection for microarray gene expression data using simulated annealing guided by the multivariate joint entropy
In this work a new way to calculate the multivariate joint entropy is presented. This measure is the basis for a fast information-theoretic based evaluation of gene relevance in a Microarray Gene Expression data context. Its low complexity is based on the reuse of previous computations to calculate current feature relevance. The mu-TAFS algorithm --named as such to differentiate it from previous TAFS algorithms-- implements a simulated annealing technique specially designed for feature subset selection. The algorithm is applied to the maximization of gene subset relevance in several public-domain microarray data sets. The experimental results show a notoriously high classification performance and low size subsets formed by biologically meaningful genes.Postprint (published version
Focus+Context via Snaking Paths
Focus+context visualizations reveal specific structures in high detail while effectively depicting its surroundings, often relying on transitions between the two areas to provide context. We present an approach to generate focus+context visualizations depicting cylindrical structures along snaking paths that enables the structures themselves to become the transitions and focal areas, simultaneously. A method to automatically create a snaking path through space by applying a path finding algorithm is presented. A 3D curve is created based on the 2D snaking path. We describe a process to deform cylindrical structures in segmented volumetric models to match the curve and provide preliminary geometric models as templates for artists to build upon. Structures are discovered using our constrained volumetric sculpting method that enables removal of occluding material while leaving them intact. We find the resulting visualizations effectively mimic a set of motivating illustrations and discuss some limitations of the automatic approach
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