4,180 research outputs found
Selective rendering for efficient ray traced stereoscopic images
Depth-related visual effects are a key feature of many virtual environments. In stereo-based systems, the depth effect can be produced by delivering frames of disparate image pairs, while in monocular environments, the viewer has to extract this depth information from a single image by examining details such as perspective and shadows. This paper investigates via a number of psychophysical experiments, whether we can reduce computational effort and still achieve perceptually high-quality rendering for stereo imagery. We examined selectively rendering the image pairs by exploiting the fusing capability and depth perception underlying human stereo vision. In ray-tracing-based global illumination systems, a higher image resolution introduces more computation to the rendering process since many more rays need to be traced. We first investigated whether we could utilise the human binocular fusing ability and significantly reduce the resolution of one of the image pairs and yet retain a high perceptual quality under stereo viewing condition. Secondly, we evaluated subjects' performance on a specific visual task that required accurate depth perception. We found that subjects required far fewer rendered depth cues in the stereo viewing environment to perform the task well. Avoiding rendering these detailed cues saved significant computational time. In fact it was possible to achieve a better task performance in the stereo viewing condition at a combined rendering time for the image pairs less than that required for the single monocular image. The outcome of this study suggests that we can produce more efficient stereo images for depth-related visual tasks by selective rendering and exploiting inherent features of human stereo vision
Detail-preserving and Content-aware Variational Multi-view Stereo Reconstruction
Accurate recovery of 3D geometrical surfaces from calibrated 2D multi-view
images is a fundamental yet active research area in computer vision. Despite
the steady progress in multi-view stereo reconstruction, most existing methods
are still limited in recovering fine-scale details and sharp features while
suppressing noises, and may fail in reconstructing regions with few textures.
To address these limitations, this paper presents a Detail-preserving and
Content-aware Variational (DCV) multi-view stereo method, which reconstructs
the 3D surface by alternating between reprojection error minimization and mesh
denoising. In reprojection error minimization, we propose a novel inter-image
similarity measure, which is effective to preserve fine-scale details of the
reconstructed surface and builds a connection between guided image filtering
and image registration. In mesh denoising, we propose a content-aware
-minimization algorithm by adaptively estimating the value and
regularization parameters based on the current input. It is much more promising
in suppressing noise while preserving sharp features than conventional
isotropic mesh smoothing. Experimental results on benchmark datasets
demonstrate that our DCV method is capable of recovering more surface details,
and obtains cleaner and more accurate reconstructions than state-of-the-art
methods. In particular, our method achieves the best results among all
published methods on the Middlebury dino ring and dino sparse ring datasets in
terms of both completeness and accuracy.Comment: 14 pages,16 figures. Submitted to IEEE Transaction on image
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Variational Disparity Estimation Framework for Plenoptic Image
This paper presents a computational framework for accurately estimating the
disparity map of plenoptic images. The proposed framework is based on the
variational principle and provides intrinsic sub-pixel precision. The
light-field motion tensor introduced in the framework allows us to combine
advanced robust data terms as well as provides explicit treatments for
different color channels. A warping strategy is embedded in our framework for
tackling the large displacement problem. We also show that by applying a simple
regularization term and a guided median filtering, the accuracy of displacement
field at occluded area could be greatly enhanced. We demonstrate the excellent
performance of the proposed framework by intensive comparisons with the Lytro
software and contemporary approaches on both synthetic and real-world datasets
Relightable Neural Human Assets from Multi-view Gradient Illuminations
Human modeling and relighting are two fundamental problems in computer vision
and graphics, where high-quality datasets can largely facilitate related
research. However, most existing human datasets only provide multi-view human
images captured under the same illumination. Although valuable for modeling
tasks, they are not readily used in relighting problems. To promote research in
both fields, in this paper, we present UltraStage, a new 3D human dataset that
contains more than 2,000 high-quality human assets captured under both
multi-view and multi-illumination settings. Specifically, for each example, we
provide 32 surrounding views illuminated with one white light and two gradient
illuminations. In addition to regular multi-view images, gradient illuminations
help recover detailed surface normal and spatially-varying material maps,
enabling various relighting applications. Inspired by recent advances in neural
representation, we further interpret each example into a neural human asset
which allows novel view synthesis under arbitrary lighting conditions. We show
our neural human assets can achieve extremely high capture performance and are
capable of representing fine details such as facial wrinkles and cloth folds.
We also validate UltraStage in single image relighting tasks, training neural
networks with virtual relighted data from neural assets and demonstrating
realistic rendering improvements over prior arts. UltraStage will be publicly
available to the community to stimulate significant future developments in
various human modeling and rendering tasks. The dataset is available at
https://miaoing.github.io/RNHA.Comment: Project page: https://miaoing.github.io/RNH
Dense Vision in Image-guided Surgery
Image-guided surgery needs an efficient and effective camera tracking system in order to perform augmented reality for overlaying preoperative models or label cancerous tissues on the 2D video images of the surgical scene. Tracking in endoscopic/laparoscopic scenes however is an extremely difficult task primarily due to tissue deformation, instrument invasion into the surgical scene and the presence of specular highlights. State of the art feature-based SLAM systems such as PTAM fail in tracking such scenes since the number of good features to track is very limited. When the scene is smoky and when there are instrument motions, it will cause feature-based tracking to fail immediately.
The work of this thesis provides a systematic approach to this problem using dense vision. We initially attempted to register a 3D preoperative model with multiple 2D endoscopic/laparoscopic images using a dense method but this approach did not perform well. We subsequently proposed stereo reconstruction to directly obtain the 3D structure of the scene. By using the dense reconstructed model together with robust estimation, we demonstrate that dense stereo tracking can be incredibly robust even within extremely challenging endoscopic/laparoscopic scenes.
Several validation experiments have been conducted in this thesis. The proposed stereo reconstruction algorithm has turned out to be the state of the art method for several publicly available ground truth datasets. Furthermore, the proposed robust dense stereo tracking algorithm has been proved highly accurate in synthetic environment (< 0.1 mm RMSE) and qualitatively extremely robust when being applied to real scenes in RALP prostatectomy surgery. This is an important step toward achieving accurate image-guided laparoscopic surgery.Open Acces
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