New Models for High-Quality Surface Reconstruction and Rendering

The efficient reconstruction and artifact-free visualization of surfaces from measured real-world data is an important issue in various applications, such as medical and scientific visualization, quality control, and the media-related industry. The main contribution of this thesis is the development of the first efficient GPU-based reconstruction and visualization methods using trivariate splines, i.e., splines defined on tetrahedral partitions. Our methods show that these models are very well-suited for real-time reconstruction and high-quality visualizations of surfaces from volume data. We create a new quasi-interpolating operator which for the first time solves the problem of finding a globally C1-smooth quadratic spline approximating data and where no tetrahedra need to be further subdivided. In addition, we devise a new projection method for point sets arising from a sufficiently dense sampling of objects. Compared with existing approaches, high-quality surface triangulations can be generated with guaranteed numerical stability. Keywords. Piecewise polynomials; trivariate splines; quasi-interpolation; volume data; GPU ray casting; surface reconstruction; point set surface

New Models for High-Quality Surface Reconstruction and Rendering

The efficient reconstruction and artifact-free visualization of surfaces from measured real-world data is an important issue in various applications, such as medical and scientific visualization, quality control, and the media-related industry. The main contribution of this thesis is the development of the first efficient GPU-based reconstruction and visualization methods using trivariate splines, i.e., splines defined on tetrahedral partitions. Our methods show that these models are very well-suited for real-time reconstruction and high-quality visualizations of surfaces from volume data. We create a new quasi-interpolating operator which for the first time solves the problem of finding a globally C1-smooth quadratic spline approximating data and where no tetrahedra need to be further subdivided. In addition, we devise a new projection method for point sets arising from a sufficiently dense sampling of objects. Compared with existing approaches, high-quality surface triangulations can be generated with guaranteed numerical stability. Keywords. Piecewise polynomials; trivariate splines; quasi-interpolation; volume data; GPU ray casting; surface reconstruction; point set surface

Lagrange interpolation and quasi-interpolation using trivariate splines on a uniform partition

We develop quasi-interpolation methods and a Lagrange interpolation method for trivariate splines on a regular tetrahedral partition, based on the Bernstein-Bézier representation of polynomials. The partition is based on the bodycentered cubic grid. Our quasi-interpolation operators use quintic C2 splines and are defined by giving explicit formulae for each coefficient. One operator satisfies a certain convexity condition, but has sub-optimal approximation order. A second operator has optimal approximation order, while a third operator interpolates the provided data values. The first two operators are defined by a small set of computation rules which can be applied independently to all tetrahedra of the underlying partition. The interpolating operator is more complex while maintaining the best-possible approximation order for the spline space. It relies on a decomposition of the partition into four classes, for each of which a set of computation rules is provided. Moreover, we develop algorithms that construct blending operators which are based on two quasi-interpolation operators defined for the same spline space, one of which is convex. The resulting blending operator satisfies the convexity condition for a given data set. The local Lagrange interpolation method is based on cubic C1 splines and focuses on low locality. Our method is 2-local, while comparable methods are at least 4-local. We provide numerical tests which confirm the results, and high-quality visualizations of both artificial and real-world data sets

Interactive Isosurfaces with Quadratic C 1 Splines on Truncated Octahedral Partitions

The reconstruction of a continuous function from discrete data is a basic task in many applications such as the visualization of 3D volumetric data sets. We use a local approximation method for quadratic C1 splines on uniform tetrahedral partitions to achieve a globally smooth function. The spline is based on a truncated octahedral partition of the volumetric domain, where each truncated octahedron is further split into a fixed number of disjunct tetrahedra. The Bernstein-Bézier coefficients of the piecewise polynomials are directly determined by appropriate combinations of the data values in a local neighborhood. As previously shown, the splines provide an approximation order two for smooth functions as well as their derivatives. We present the first visualizations using these splines and show that they are well-suited for GPU-based, interactive high-quality visualization of isosurfaces from discrete data

Numerical simulation of fracture pattern development and implications for fuid flow

Simulations are instrumental to understanding flow through discrete fracture geometric representations that capture the large-scale permeability structure of fractured porous media. The contribution of this thesis is threefold: an efficient finite-element finite-volume discretisation of the advection/diffusion flow equations, a geomechanical fracture propagation algorithm to create fractured rock analogues, and a study of the effect of growth on hydraulic conductivity. We describe an iterative geomechanics-based finite-element model to simulate quasi-static crack propagation in a linear elastic matrix from an initial set of random flaws. The cornerstones are a failure and propagation criterion as well as a geometric kernel for dynamic shape housekeeping and automatic remeshing. Two-dimensional patterns exhibit connectivity, spacing, and density distributions reproducing en echelon crack linkage, tip hooking, and polygonal shrinkage forms. Differential stresses at the boundaries yield fracture curving. A stress field study shows that curvature can be suppressed by layer interaction effects. Our method is appropriate to model layered media where interaction with neighbouring layers does not dominate deformation. Geomechanically generated fracture patterns are the input to single-phase flow simulations through fractures and matrix. Thus, results are applicable to fractured porous media in addition to crystalline rocks. Stress state and deformation history control emergent local fracture apertures. Results depend on the number of initial flaws, their initial random distribution, and the permeability of the matrix. Straightpath fracture pattern simplifications yield a lower effective permeability in comparison to their curved counterparts. Fixed apertures overestimate the conductivity of the rock by up to six orders of magnitude. Local sample percolation effects are representative of the entire model flow behaviour for geomechanical apertures. Effective permeability in fracture dataset subregions are higher than the overall conductivity of the system. The presented methodology captures emerging patterns due to evolving geometric and flow properties essential to the realistic simulation of subsurface processes

Multi-Scale Surface Reconstruction from Images

Many surface reconstruction algorithms have been developed to process point data originating from laser scans. Because laser scanning is a very expensive technique and not available to everyone, 3D reconstruction from images (using, e.g., multi-view stereo) is a promising alternative. In recent years a lot of progress has been made in the computer vision domain and nowadays algorithms are capable of reconstructing large 3D scenes from consumer photographs. Whereas laser scans are very controlled and typically only a few scans are taken, images may be subject to more uncontrolled variations. Standard multi-view stereo algorithms give rise to multi-scale data points due to different camera resolutions, focal lengths, or various distances to the object. When reconstructing a surface from this data, the multi-scale property has to be taken into account because the assumption that the points are samples from the true surface might be violated. This thesis presents two surface reconstruction algorithms that take resolution and scale differences into account. In the first approach we model the uncertainty of each sample point according to its footprint, the surface area that was taken into account during multi-view stereo. With an adaptive volumetric resolution, also steered by the footprints of the sample points, we achieve detailed reconstructions even for large-scale scenes. Then, a general wavelet-based surface reconstruction framework is presented. The multi-scale sample points are characterized by a convolution kernel and the points are fused in frequency space while preserving locality. We suggest a specific implementation for 2.5D surfaces that incorporates our theoretic findings about sample points originating from multi-view stereo and shows promising results on real-world data sets. The other part of the thesis analyzes the scale characteristics of patch-based depth reconstruction as used in many (multi-view) stereo techniques. It is driven by the question how the reconstruction preserves surface details or high frequencies. We introduce an intuitive model for the reconstruction process, prove that it yields a linear system and determine the modulation transfer function. This allows us to predict the amplitude loss of high frequencies in connection with the used patch-size and the internal and external camera parameters. Experiments on synthetic and real-world data demonstrate the accuracy of our model but also show the limitations. Finally, we propose a generalization of the model allowing for weighted patch fitting. The reconstructed points can then be described by a convolution of the original surface and we show how weighting the pixels during photo-consistency optimization affects the smoothing kernel. In this way we are able to connect a standard notion of smoothing to multi-view stereo reconstruction. In summary, this thesis provides a profound analysis of patch-based (multi-view) stereo reconstruction and introduces new concepts for surface reconstruction from the resulting multi-scale sample points