Real-time selective rendering

Traditional physically-based renderers can produce highly realistic imagery; however, suffer from lengthy execution times, which make them impractical for use in interactive applications. Selective rendering exploits limitations in the human visual system to render images that are perceptually similar to high-fidelity renderings in a fraction of the time. This paper outlines current research being carried out by the author to tackle this problem, using a combination of ray-tracing acceleration techniques, GPU-based processing, and selective rendering methods. The research will also seek to confirm results published in literature, which indicate that users fail to notice any quality degradation between high-fidelity imagery and a corresponding selective rendering.peer-reviewe

TetSplat: Real-time Rendering and Volume Clipping of Large Unstructured Tetrahedral Meshes

We present a novel approach to interactive visualization and exploration of large unstructured tetrahedral meshes. These massive 3D meshes are used in mission-critical CFD and structural mechanics simulations, and typically sample multiple field values on several millions of unstructured grid points. Our method relies on the pre-processing of the tetrahedral mesh to partition it into non-convex boundaries and internal fragments that are subsequently encoded into compressed multi-resolution data representations. These compact hierarchical data structures are then adaptively rendered and probed in real-time on a commodity PC. Our point-based rendering algorithm, which is inspired by QSplat, employs a simple but highly efficient splatting technique that guarantees interactive frame-rates regardless of the size of the input mesh and the available rendering hardware. It furthermore allows for real-time probing of the volumetric data-set through constructive solid geometry operations as well as interactive editing of color transfer functions for an arbitrary number of field values. Thus, the presented visualization technique allows end-users for the first time to interactively render and explore very large unstructured tetrahedral meshes on relatively inexpensive hardware

Ray Casting for Iso-surface in Volumetric Data

Volume data visualization is an active field of research and development. It can be applied in many areas such as medical, oil and gas exploration, etc... Although volume visualization is highly computational cost, there is a vision of real time volumetric visualization systems based on interactive ray tracing. Over the years, many rendering algorithms have been created and enhanced. The focus of this project is to develop a simple ray casting program for volumetric data. The program will be able to render specific volume data using a single processor in a reasonable amount of time. It is opento improve for implementation on multiprocessors. The thesis will compare some existing algorithms for ray casting in terms of image quality, computing time, complexity and so forth. The thesis includes a proposal of new multisampling algorithm, which significantly reduces rendering time while producing similar quality of image with existing algorithms

MIMO Capacity Estimation at 2 GHz with a Ray Model in Urban Cellular Environment

MIMO technology promises a linear increase of capacity in function of the minimum antenna number at the transmitter and at the receiver. In order to test if these performances can be actually met in mobile communications, we propose here a study of MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) capacity in urban cellular environment at 2 GHz with a help of an efficient ray propagation model. We have tested different types of base station antennas (vertically or ±45° polarized) and two different types of mobile. Capacity is found to significantly increase between SISO (Single Input Single Output) and MIMO systems, but less than usually expected. We show that return and coupling losses as low as 10% can also reduce significantly the capacity. On the other hand, we study the influence of the way to take into account received power level on the MIMO capacity estimation

Efficient 2D ray-tracing method for narrow and wide-band channel characterization in micro-cellular configurations

International audienceChannel characterization is an essential step to the development of outdoor or indoor wireless networks. Indeed, for multimedia applications, new radio mobile systems must accurately take into account channel behavior. In this paper, we propose an efficient 2D ray-tracing method to characterize the narrow and wide-band radio channels for a very large number of receivers in micro-cellular configurations. It is based on a quick pre-calculation of an exact 2D visibility graph. The proposed method follows an ITU recommendation, which advocates, for wide-band characterization, only considering the paths included in a 18 dB dynamic range of power impulse response. Contrary to the classical approach, which consists in thresholding the complete impulse response in a post-treatment, our method only computes the significant paths. The interest of the proposed method resides in its significant computation time reduction factor, in comparison with the classical approach and this without any significant loss in accuracy. Received power and wide-band parameter maps are computed for about 40,000 receivers, in a dense urban environment, and are provided with an approximate reduction factor of 4 and 80% of null estimation error in comparison to a classical approach

Typical MIMO propagation channels in urban macrocells at 2GHz

International audienceA directional wideband measurement campaign was performed in urban macrocells at 2 GHz using a channel sounder and a 8-sensor linear antenna array at the base station. Directions of arrival at the Base Station (BS) were estimated by beamforming using the antenna array. Directions of arrival at the Mobile Station (MS) were estimated by beamforming using parts of the measurement route. Global parameters (delay spread, azimuth spread at BS, maximum factor and street canyon factor) were processed from the Azimuth-Delay Power Profiles (ADPP) at BS and MS. In this paper, we compare the statistics of these four parameters with the statistics of those simulated by the 3GPP-SCM system-level model and the statistics of those reported in the literature. We find an acceptable agreement between our measurements and the SCM model except for the delay spread and the street canyon factor. The azimuth spread at BS mean Value (9.5°) and delay spread mean value (0.250 μs) are also in accordance with values reported in other references. Azimuth spreads are ranged from 7° to 11°, and delay spreads are ranged from 0.1 μs to 1 μs. From a statistical analysis of global parameters, we show that most of the measured propagation Channels can be classified in three main categories: low spatial diversity at MS and BS, high spatial diversity at MS and BS, low spatial diversity at BS and high spatial diversity at MS

Geometric and arithmetic culling methods for entire ray packets

technical reportRecent interactive ray tracing performance has been mainly derived from the use of ray packets. Larger ray packets allow for significant amortization of both computations and memory accesses; however, the majority of primitives are still intersected by each ray in a packet. This paper discusses several methods to cull entire ray packets against common primitives (box, triangle, and sphere) that allows an arbitrary number of rays to be tested by a single test. This provides cheap ?all miss? or ?all hit? tests and may substantially improve the performance of an interactive ray tracer. The paper surveys current methods, provides details on three particular approaches using interval arithmetic, bounding planes, and corner rays, describes how the respective bounding primitives can be easily and efficiently constructed, and points out the relation among the different fundamental concepts