17,440 research outputs found
Analysing Astronomy Algorithms for GPUs and Beyond
Astronomy depends on ever increasing computing power. Processor clock-rates
have plateaued, and increased performance is now appearing in the form of
additional processor cores on a single chip. This poses significant challenges
to the astronomy software community. Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), now
capable of general-purpose computation, exemplify both the difficult
learning-curve and the significant speedups exhibited by massively-parallel
hardware architectures. We present a generalised approach to tackling this
paradigm shift, based on the analysis of algorithms. We describe a small
collection of foundation algorithms relevant to astronomy and explain how they
may be used to ease the transition to massively-parallel computing
architectures. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by applying it
to four well-known astronomy problems: Hogbom CLEAN, inverse ray-shooting for
gravitational lensing, pulsar dedispersion and volume rendering. Algorithms
with well-defined memory access patterns and high arithmetic intensity stand to
receive the greatest performance boost from massively-parallel architectures,
while those that involve a significant amount of decision-making may struggle
to take advantage of the available processing power.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in MNRA
Review of simulating four classes of window materials for daylighting with non-standard BSDF using the simulation program Radiance
This review describes the currently available simulation models for window
material to calculate daylighting with the program "Radiance". The review is
based on four abstract and general classes of window materials, depending on
their scattering and redirecting properties (bidirectional scatter distribution
function, BSDF). It lists potential and limits of the older models and includes
the most recent additions to the software. All models are demonstrated using an
exemplary indoor scene and two typical sky conditions. It is intended as
clarification for applying window material models in project work or teaching.
The underlying algorithmic problems apply to all lighting simulation programs,
so the scenarios of materials and skies are applicable to other lighting
programs
MVF-Net: Multi-View 3D Face Morphable Model Regression
We address the problem of recovering the 3D geometry of a human face from a
set of facial images in multiple views. While recent studies have shown
impressive progress in 3D Morphable Model (3DMM) based facial reconstruction,
the settings are mostly restricted to a single view. There is an inherent
drawback in the single-view setting: the lack of reliable 3D constraints can
cause unresolvable ambiguities. We in this paper explore 3DMM-based shape
recovery in a different setting, where a set of multi-view facial images are
given as input. A novel approach is proposed to regress 3DMM parameters from
multi-view inputs with an end-to-end trainable Convolutional Neural Network
(CNN). Multiview geometric constraints are incorporated into the network by
establishing dense correspondences between different views leveraging a novel
self-supervised view alignment loss. The main ingredient of the view alignment
loss is a differentiable dense optical flow estimator that can backpropagate
the alignment errors between an input view and a synthetic rendering from
another input view, which is projected to the target view through the 3D shape
to be inferred. Through minimizing the view alignment loss, better 3D shapes
can be recovered such that the synthetic projections from one view to another
can better align with the observed image. Extensive experiments demonstrate the
superiority of the proposed method over other 3DMM methods.Comment: 2019 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognitio
Construction and Evaluation of an Ultra Low Latency Frameless Renderer for VR.
© 2016 IEEE.Latency-the delay between a users action and the response to this action-is known to be detrimental to virtual reality. Latency is typically considered to be a discrete value characterising a delay, constant in time and space-but this characterisation is incomplete. Latency changes across the display during scan-out, and how it does so is dependent on the rendering approach used. In this study, we present an ultra-low latency real-time ray-casting renderer for virtual reality, implemented on an FPGA. Our renderer has a latency of 1 ms from tracker to pixel. Its frameless nature means that the region of the display with the lowest latency immediately follows the scan-beam. This is in contrast to frame-based systems such as those using typical GPUs, for which the latency increases as scan-out proceeds. Using a series of high and low speed videos of our system in use, we confirm its latency of 1 ms. We examine how the renderer performs when driving a traditional sequential scan-out display on a readily available HMO, the Oculus Rift OK2. We contrast this with an equivalent apparatus built using a GPU. Using captured human head motion and a set of image quality measures, we assess the ability of these systems to faithfully recreate the stimuli of an ideal virtual reality system-one with a zero latency tracker, renderer and display running at 1 kHz. Finally, we examine the results of these quality measures, and how each rendering approach is affected by velocity of movement and display persistence. We find that our system, with a lower average latency, can more faithfully draw what the ideal virtual reality system would. Further, we find that with low display persistence, the sensitivity to velocity of both systems is lowered, but that it is much lower for ours
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