Contributions to Big Geospatial Data Rendering and Visualisations

Current geographical information systems lack features and components which are commonly found within rendering and game engines. When combined with computer game technologies, a modern geographical information system capable of advanced rendering and data visualisations are achievable. We have investigated the combination of big geospatial data, and computer game engines for the creation of a modern geographical information system framework capable of visualising densely populated real-world scenes using advanced rendering algorithms. The pipeline imports raw geospatial data in the form of Ordnance Survey data which is provided by the UK government, LiDAR data provided by a private company, and the global open mapping project of OpenStreetMap. The data is combined to produce additional terrain data where data is missing from the high resolution data sources of LiDAR by utilising interpolated Ordnance Survey data. Where data is missing from LiDAR, the same interpolation techniques are also utilised. Once a high resolution terrain data set which is complete in regards to coverage, is generated, sub datasets can be extracted from the LiDAR using OSM boundary data as a perimeter. The boundaries of OSM represent buildings or assets. Data can then be extracted such as the heights of buildings. This data can then be used to update the OSM database. Using a novel adjacency matrix extraction technique, 3D model mesh objects can be generated using both LiDAR and OSM information. The generation of model mesh objects created from OSM data utilises procedural content generation techniques, enabling the generation of GIS based 3D real-world scenes. Although only LiDAR and Ordnance Survey for UK data is available, restricting the generation to the UK borders, using OSM alone, the system is able to procedurally generate any place within the world covered by OSM. In this research, to manage the large amounts of data, a novel scenegraph structure has been generated to spatially separate OSM data according to OS coordinates, splitting the UK into 1kilometer squared tiles, and categorising OSM assets such as buildings, highways, amenities. Once spatially organised, and categorised as an asset of importance, the novel scenegraph allows for data dispersal through an entire scene in real-time. The 3D real-world scenes visualised within the runtime simulator can be manipulated in four main aspects; • Viewing at any angle or location through the use of a 3D and 2D camera system. • Modifying the effects or effect parameters applied to the 3D model mesh objects to visualise user defined data by use of our novel algorithms and unique lighting data-structure effect file with accompanying material interface. • Procedurally generating animations which can be applied to the spatial parameters of objects, or the visual properties of objects. • Applying Indexed Array Shader Function and taking advantage of the novel big geospatial scenegraph structure to exploit better rendering techniques in the context of a modern Geographical Information System, which has not been done, to the best of our knowledge. Combined with a novel scenegraph structure layout, the user can view and manipulate real-world procedurally generated worlds with additional user generated content in a number of unique and unseen ways within the current geographical information system implementations. We evaluate multiple functionalities and aspects of the framework. We evaluate the performance of the system, measuring frame rates with multi sized maps by stress testing means, as well as evaluating the benefits of the novel scenegraph structure for categorising, separating, manoeuvring, and data dispersal. Uniform scaling by n2 of scenegraph nodes which contain no model mesh data, procedurally generated model data, and user generated model data. The experiment compared runtime parameters, and memory consumption. We have compared the technical features of the framework against that of real-world related commercial projects; Google Maps, OSM2World, OSM-3D, OSM-Buildings, OpenStreetMap, ArcGIS, Sustainability Assessment Visualisation and Enhancement (SAVE), and Autonomous Learning Agents for Decentralised Data and Information (ALLADIN). We conclude that when compared to related research, the framework produces data-sets relevant for visualising geospatial assets from the combination of real-world data-sets, capable of being used by a multitude of external game engines, applications, and geographical information systems. The ability to manipulate the production of said data-sets at pre-compile time aids processing speeds for runtime simulation. This ability is provided by the pre-processor. The added benefit is to allow users to manipulate the spatial and visual parameters in a number of varying ways with minimal domain knowledge. The features of creating procedural animations attached to each of the spatial parameters and visual shading parameters allow users to view and encode their own representations of scenes which are unavailable within all of the products stated. Each of the alternative projects have similar features, but none which allow full animation ability of all parameters of an asset; spatially or visually, or both. We also evaluated the framework on the implemented features; implementing the needed algorithms and novelties of the framework as problems arose in the development of the framework. Examples of this is the algorithm for combining the multiple terrain data-sets we have (Ordnance Survey terrain data and Light Detection and Ranging Digital Surface Model data and Digital Terrain Model data), and combining them in a justifiable way to produce maps with no missing data values for further analysis and visualisation. A majority of visualisations are rendered using an Indexed Array Shader Function effect file, structured to create a novel design to encapsulate common rendering effects found in commercial computer games, and apply them to the rendering of real-world assets for a modern geographical information system. Maps of various size, in both dimensions, polygonal density, asset counts, and memory consumption prove successful in relation to real-time rendering parameters i.e. the visualisation of maps do not create a bottleneck for processing. The visualised scenes allow users to view large dense environments which include terrain models within procedural and user generated buildings, highways, amenities, and boundaries. The use of a novel scenegraph structure allows for the fast iteration and search from user defined dynamic queries. The interaction with the framework is allowed through a novel Interactive Visualisation Interface. Utilising the interface, a user can apply procedurally generated animations to both spatial and visual properties to any node or model mesh within the scene. We conclude that the framework has been a success. We have completed what we have set out to develop and create, we have combined multiple data-sets to create improved terrain data-sets for further research and development. We have created a framework which combines the real-world data of Ordnance Survey, LiDAR, and OpenStreetMap, and implemented algorithms to create procedural assets of buildings, highways, terrain, amenities, model meshes, and boundaries. for visualisation, with implemented features which allows users to search and manipulate a city’s worth of data on a per-object basis, or user-defined combinations. The successful framework has been built by the cross domain specialism needed for such a project. We have combined the areas of; computer games technology, engine and framework development, procedural generation techniques and algorithms, use of real-world data-sets, geographical information system development, data-parsing, big-data algorithmic reduction techniques, and visualisation using shader techniques

Computer Game Innovation

Faculty of Technical Physics, Information Technology and Applied Mathematics. Institute of Information TechnologyWydział Fizyki Technicznej, Informatyki i Matematyki Stosowanej. Instytut InformatykiThe "Computer Game Innovations" series is an international forum designed to enable the exchange of knowledge and expertise in the field of video game development. Comprising both academic research and industrial needs, the series aims at advancing innovative industry-academia collaboration. The monograph provides a unique set of articles presenting original research conducted in the leading academic centres which specialise in video games education. The goal of the publication is, among others, to enhance networking opportunities for industry and university representatives seeking to form R&D partnerships. This publication covers the key focus areas specified in the GAMEINN sectoral programme supported by the National Centre for Research and Development

A high performance vector rendering pipeline

Vector images are images which encode visible surfaces of a 3D scene, in a resolution independent format. Prior to this work generation of such an image was not real time. As such the benefits of using them in the graphics pipeline were not fully expressed. In this thesis we propose methods for addressing the following questions. How can we introduce vector images into the graphics pipeline, namingly, how can we produce them in real time. How can we take advantage of resolution independence, and how can we render vector images to a pixel display as efficiently as possible and with the highest quality. There are three main contributions of this work. We have designed a real time vector rendering system. That is, we present a GPU accelerated pipeline which takes as an input a scene with 3D geometry, and outputs a vector image. We call this system SVGPU: Scalable Vector Graphics on the GPU. As mentioned vector images are resolution independent. We have designed a cloud pipeline for streaming vector images. That is, we present system design and optimizations for streaming vector images across interconnection networks, which reduces the bandwidth required for transporting real time 3D content from server to client. Lastly, in this thesis we introduce another added benefit of vector images. We have created a method for rendering them with the highest possible quality. That is, we have designed a new set of operations on vector images, which allows us to anti-alias them during rendering to a canonical 2D image. Our contributions provide the system design, optimizations, and algorithms required to bring vector image utilization and benefits much closer to the real time graphics pipeline. Together they form an end to end pipeline to this purpose, i.e. "A High Performance Vector Rendering Pipeline.

Biased Mixtures Of Experts: Enabling Computer Vision Inference Under Data Transfer Limitations

We propose a novel mixture-of-experts class to optimize computer vision models in accordance with data transfer limitations at test time. Our approach postulates that the minimum acceptable amount of data allowing for highly-accurate results can vary for different input space partitions. Therefore, we consider mixtures where experts require different amounts of data, and train a sparse gating function to divide the input space for each expert. By appropriate hyperparameter selection, our approach is able to bias mixtures of experts towards selecting specific experts over others. In this way, we show that the data transfer optimization between visual sensing and processing can be solved as a convex optimization problem.To demonstrate the relation between data availability and performance, we evaluate biased mixtures on a range of mainstream computer vision problems, namely: (i) single shot detection, (ii) image super resolution, and (iii) realtime video action classification. For all cases, and when experts constitute modified baselines to meet different limits on allowed data utility, biased mixtures significantly outperform previous work optimized to meet the same constraints on available data

Neural Radiance Fields: Past, Present, and Future

The various aspects like modeling and interpreting 3D environments and surroundings have enticed humans to progress their research in 3D Computer Vision, Computer Graphics, and Machine Learning. An attempt made by Mildenhall et al in their paper about NeRFs (Neural Radiance Fields) led to a boom in Computer Graphics, Robotics, Computer Vision, and the possible scope of High-Resolution Low Storage Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality-based 3D models have gained traction from res with more than 1000 preprints related to NeRFs published. This paper serves as a bridge for people starting to study these fields by building on the basics of Mathematics, Geometry, Computer Vision, and Computer Graphics to the difficulties encountered in Implicit Representations at the intersection of all these disciplines. This survey provides the history of rendering, Implicit Learning, and NeRFs, the progression of research on NeRFs, and the potential applications and implications of NeRFs in today's world. In doing so, this survey categorizes all the NeRF-related research in terms of the datasets used, objective functions, applications solved, and evaluation criteria for these applications.Comment: 413 pages, 9 figures, 277 citation

Interactive web-based visualization

The visualization of large amounts of data, which cannot be easily copied for processing on a user’s local machine, is not yet a fully solved problem. Remote visualization represents one possible solution approach to the problem, and has long been an important research topic. Depending on the device used, modern hardware, such as high-performance GPUs, is sometimes not available. This is another reason for the use of remote visualization. Additionally, due to the growing global networking and collaboration among research groups, collaborative remote visualization solutions are becoming more important. The additional use of collaborative visualization solutions is eventually due to the growing global networking and collaboration among research groups. The attractiveness of web-based remote visualization is greatly increased by the wide availability of web browsers on almost all devices; these are available today on all systems - from desktop computers to smartphones. In order to ensure interactivity, network bandwidth and latency are the biggest challenges that web-based visualization algorithms have to solve. Despite the steady improvements in available bandwidth, these improvements are still significantly slower than, for example, processor performance, resulting in increasing the impact of this bottleneck. For example, visualization of large dynamic data in low-bandwidth environments can be challenging because it requires continuous data transfer. However, bandwidth improvement alone cannot improve the latency because it is also affected by factors such as the distance between server and client and network utilization. To overcome these challenges, a combination of techniques is needed to customize the individual processing steps of the visualization pipeline, from efficient data representation to hardware-accelerated rendering on the client side. This thesis first deals with related work in the field of remote visualization with a particular focus on interactive web-based visualization and then presents techniques for interactive visualization in the browser using modern web standards such as WebGL and HTML5. These techniques enable the visualization of dynamic molecular data sets with more than one million atoms at interactive frame rates using GPU-based ray casting. Due to the limitations which exist in a browser-based environment, the concrete implementation of the GPU-based ray casting had to be customized. Evaluation of the resulting performance shows that GPU-based techniques enable the interactive rendering of large data sets and achieve higher image quality compared to polygon-based techniques. In order to reduce data transfer times and network latency, and improve rendering speed, efficient approaches for data representation and transmission are used. Furthermore, this thesis introduces a GPU-based volume-ray marching technique based on WebGL 2.0, which uses progressive brick-wise data transfer, as well as multiple levels of detail in order to achieve interactive volume rendering of datasets stored on a server. The concepts and results presented in this thesis contribute to the further spread of interactive web-based visualization. The algorithmic and technological advances that have been achieved form a basis for further development of interactive browser-based visualization applications. At the same time, this approach has the potential for enabling future collaborative visualization in the cloud.Die Visualisierung großer Datenmengen, welche nicht ohne Weiteres zur Verarbeitung auf den lokalen Rechner des Anwenders kopiert werden können, ist ein bisher nicht zufriedenstellend gelöstes Problem. Remote-Visualisierung stellt einen möglichen Lösungsansatz dar und ist deshalb seit langem ein relevantes Forschungsthema. Abhängig vom verwendeten Endgerät ist moderne Hardware, wie etwa performante GPUs, teilweise nicht verfügbar. Dies ist ein weiterer Grund für den Einsatz von Remote-Visualisierung. Durch die zunehmende globale Vernetzung und Kollaboration von Forschungsgruppen gewinnt kollaborative Remote-Visualisierung zusätzlich an Bedeutung. Die Attraktivität web-basierter Remote-Visualisierung wird durch die weitreichende Verfügbarkeit von Web-Browsern auf nahezu allen Endgeräten enorm gesteigert; diese sind heutzutage auf allen Systemen - vom Desktop-Computer bis zum Smartphone - vorhanden. Bei der Gewährleistung der Interaktivität sind Bandbreite und Latenz der Netzwerkverbindung die größten Herausforderungen, welche von web-basierten Visualisierungs-Algorithmen gelöst werden müssen. Trotz der stetigen Verbesserungen hinsichtlich der verfügbaren Bandbreite steigt diese signifikant langsamer als beispielsweise die Prozessorleistung, wodurch sich die Auswirkung dieses Flaschenhalses immer weiter verstärkt. So kann beispielsweise die Visualisierung großer dynamischer Daten in Umgebungen mit geringer Bandbreite eine Herausforderung darstellen, da kontinuierlicher Datentransfer benötigt wird. Dennoch kann die alleinige Verbesserung der Bandbreite keine entsprechende Verbesserung der Latenz bewirken, da diese zudem von Faktoren wie der Distanz zwischen Server und Client sowie der Netzwerkauslastung beeinflusst wird. Um diese Herausforderungen zu bewältigen, wird eine Kombination verschiedener Techniken für die Anpassung der einzelnen Verarbeitungsschritte der Visualisierungspipeline benötigt, angefangen bei effizienter Datenrepräsentation bis hin zu hardware-beschleunigtem Rendering auf der Client-Seite. Diese Doktorarbeit befasst sich zunächst mit verwandten Arbeiten auf dem Gebiet der Remote-Visualisierung mit besonderem Fokus auf interaktiver web-basierter Visualisierung und präsentiert danach Techniken für die interaktive Visualisierung im Browser mit Hilfe moderner Web-Standards wie WebGL und HTML5. Diese Techniken ermöglichen die Visualisierung dynamischer molekularer Datensätze mit mehr als einer Million Atomen bei interaktiven Frameraten durch die Verwendung GPU-basierten Raycastings. Aufgrund der Einschränkungen, welche in einer Browser-basierten Umgebung vorliegen, musste die konkrete Implementierung des GPU-basierten Raycastings angepasst werden. Die Evaluation der daraus resultierenden Performanz zeigt, dass GPU-basierte Techniken das interaktive Rendering von großen Datensätzen ermöglichen und eine im Vergleich zu Polygon-basierten Techniken höhere Bildqualität erreichen. Zur Verringerung der Übertragungszeiten, Reduktion der Latenz und Verbesserung der Darstellungsgeschwindigkeit werden effiziente Ansätze zur Datenrepräsentation und übertragung verwendet. Des Weiteren wird in dieser Doktorarbeit eine GPU-basierte Volumen-Ray-Marching-Technik auf Basis von WebGL 2.0 eingeführt, welche progressive blockweise Datenübertragung verwendet, sowie verschiedene Detailgrade, um ein interaktives Volumenrendering von auf dem Server gespeicherten Datensätzen zu erreichen. Die in dieser Doktorarbeit präsentierten Konzepte und Resultate tragen zur weiteren Verbreitung von interaktiver web-basierter Visualisierung bei. Die erzielten algorithmischen und technologischen Fortschritte bilden eine Grundlage für weiterführende Entwicklungen von interaktiven Visualisierungsanwendungen auf Browser-Basis. Gleichzeitig hat dieser Ansatz das Potential, zukünftig kollaborative Visualisierung in der Cloud zu ermöglichen

Digital Alchemy: Matter and Metamorphosis in Contemporary Digital Animation and Interface Design

The recent proliferation of special effects in Hollywood film has ushered in an era of digital transformation. Among scholars, digital technology is hailed as a revolutionary moment in the history of communication and representation. Nevertheless, media scholars and cultural historians have difficulty finding a language adequate to theorizing digital artifacts because they are not just texts to be deciphered. Rather, digital media artifacts also invite critiques about the status of reality because they resurrect ancient problems of embodiment and transcendence.In contrast to scholarly approaches to digital technology, computer engineers, interface designers, and special effects producers have invented a robust set of terms and phrases to describe the practice of digital animation. In order to address this disconnect between producers of new media and scholars of new media, I argue that the process of digital animation borrows extensively from a set of preexisting terms describing materiality that were prominent for centuries prior to the scientific revolution. Specifically, digital animators and interface designers make use of the ancient science, art, and technological craft of alchemy. Both alchemy and digital animation share several fundamental elements: both boast the power of being able to transform one material, substance, or thing into a different material, substance, or thing. Both seek to transcend the body and materiality but in the process, find that this elusive goal (realism and gold) is forever receding onto the horizon.The introduction begins with a literature review of the field of digital media studies. It identifies a gap in the field concerning disparate arguments about new media technology. On the one hand, scholars argue that new technologies like cyberspace and digital technology enable radical new forms of engagement with media on individual, social, and economic levels. At the same time that media scholars assert that our current epoch is marked by a historical rupture, many other researchers claim that new media are increasingly characterized by ancient metaphysical problems like embodiment and transcendence. In subsequent chapters I investigate this disparity