Adaptive isocurves based rendering for freeform surfaces

Journal ArticleFreeform surface rendering is traditionally performed by approximating the surface with polygons and then rendering the polygons. This approach is extremely common because of the complexity in accurately rendering the surfaces directly. Recently, several papers presented methods to render surfaces as sequences of isocurves. Unfortunately, these methods start by assuming that an appropriate collection of isocurves has already been derived. The algorithms themselves neither automatically create an optimal or almost optimal set of isocurves so t h e whole surface would be correctly rendered without having pixels redundantly visited nor automatically compute the parameter spacing required between isocurves to guarantee such coverage. In this paper, a new algorithm is developed to fill these needs. An algorithm is introduced that automatically computes a set of almost optimal isocurves covering the entire surface area. This algorithm can be combined with a fast curve rendering method, to make surface rendering without polygonal approximation practical

Recent enhancements to the GRIDGEN structured grid generation system

Significant enhancements are being implemented into the GRIDGEN3D, multiple block, structured grid generation software. Automatic, point-to-point, interblock connectivity will be possible through the addition of the domain entity to GRIDBLOCK's block construction process. Also, the unification of GRIDGEN2D and GRIDBLOCK has begun with the addition of edge grid point distribution capability to GRIDBLOCK. The geometric accuracy of surface grids and the ease with which databases may be obtained is being improved by adding support for standard computer-aided design formats (e.g., PATRAN Neutral and IGES files). Finally, volume grid quality was improved through addition of new SOR algorithm features and the new hybrid control function type to GRIDGEN3D

Interactive freeform editing techniques for large-scale, multiresolution level set models

Level set methods provide a volumetric implicit surface representation with automatic smooth blending properties and no self-intersections. They can handle arbitrary topology changes easily, and the volumetric implicit representation does not require the surface to be re-adjusted after extreme deformations. Even though they have found some use in movie productions and some medical applications, level set models are not highly utilized in either special effects industry or medical science. Lack of interactive modeling tools makes working with level set models difficult for people in these application areas.This dissertation describes techniques and algorithms for interactive freeform editing of large-scale, multiresolution level set models. Algorithms are developed to map intuitive user interactions into level set speed functions producing specific, desired surface movements. Data structures for efficient representation of very high resolution volume datasets and associated algorithms for rapid access and processing of the information within the data structures are explained. A hierarchical, multiresolution representation of level set models that allows for rapid decomposition and reconstruction of the complete full-resolution model is created for an editing framework that allows level-of-detail editing. We have developed a framework that identifies surface details prior to editing and introduces them back afterwards. Combining these two features provides a detail-preserving level set editing capability that may be used for multi-resolution modeling and texture transfer. Given the complex data structures that are required to represent large-scale, multiresolution level set models and the compute-intensive numerical methods to evaluate them, optimization techniques and algorithms have been developed to evaluate and display the dynamic isosurface embedded in the volumetric data.Ph.D., Computer Science -- Drexel University, 201

Ubiquitous Scalable Graphics: An End-to-End Framework using Wavelets

Advances in ubiquitous displays and wireless communications have fueled the emergence of exciting mobile graphics applications including 3D virtual product catalogs, 3D maps, security monitoring systems and mobile games. Current trends that use cameras to capture geometry, material reflectance and other graphics elements means that very high resolution inputs is accessible to render extremely photorealistic scenes. However, captured graphics content can be many gigabytes in size, and must be simplified before they can be used on small mobile devices, which have limited resources, such as memory, screen size and battery energy. Scaling and converting graphics content to a suitable rendering format involves running several software tools, and selecting the best resolution for target mobile device is often done by trial and error, which all takes time. Wireless errors can also affect transmitted content and aggressive compression is needed for low-bandwidth wireless networks. Most rendering algorithms are currently optimized for visual realism and speed, but are not resource or energy efficient on mobile device. This dissertation focuses on the improvement of rendering performance by reducing the impacts of these problems with UbiWave, an end-to-end Framework to enable real time mobile access to high resolution graphics using wavelets. The framework tackles the issues including simplification, transmission, and resource efficient rendering of graphics content on mobile device based on wavelets by utilizing 1) a Perceptual Error Metric (PoI) for automatically computing the best resolution of graphics content for a given mobile display to eliminate guesswork and save resources, 2) Unequal Error Protection (UEP) to improve the resilience to wireless errors, 3) an Energy-efficient Adaptive Real-time Rendering (EARR) heuristic to balance energy consumption, rendering speed and image quality and 4) an Energy-efficient Streaming Technique. The results facilitate a new class of mobile graphics application which can gracefully adapt the lowest acceptable rendering resolution to the wireless network conditions and the availability of resources and battery energy on mobile device adaptively

Appearance Preserving Rendering of Out-of-Core Polygon and NURBS Models

In Computer Aided Design (CAD) trimmed NURBS surfaces are widely used due to their flexibility. For rendering and simulation however, piecewise linear representations of these objects are required. A relatively new field in CAD is the analysis of long-term strain tests. After such a test the object is scanned with a 3d laser scanner for further processing on a PC. In all these areas of CAD the number of primitives as well as their complexity has grown constantly in the recent years. This growth is exceeding the increase of processor speed and memory size by far and posing the need for fast out-of-core algorithms. This thesis describes a processing pipeline from the input data in the form of triangular or trimmed NURBS models until the interactive rendering of these models at high visual quality. After discussing the motivation for this work and introducing basic concepts on complex polygon and NURBS models, the second part of this thesis starts with a review of existing simplification and tessellation algorithms. Additionally, an improved stitching algorithm to generate a consistent model after tessellation of a trimmed NURBS model is presented. Since surfaces need to be modified interactively during the design phase, a novel trimmed NURBS rendering algorithm is presented. This algorithm removes the bottleneck of generating and transmitting a new tessellation to the graphics card after each modification of a surface by evaluating and trimming the surface on the GPU. To achieve high visual quality, the appearance of a surface can be preserved using texture mapping. Therefore, a texture mapping algorithm for trimmed NURBS surfaces is presented. To reduce the memory requirements for the textures, the algorithm is modified to generate compressed normal maps to preserve the shading of the original surface. Since texturing is only possible, when a parametric mapping of the surface - requiring additional memory - is available, a new simplification and tessellation error measure is introduced that preserves the appearance of the original surface by controlling the deviation of normal vectors. The preservation of normals and possibly other surface attributes allows interactive visualization for quality control applications (e.g. isophotes and reflection lines). In the last part out-of-core techniques for processing and rendering of gigabyte-sized polygonal and trimmed NURBS models are presented. Then the modifications necessary to support streaming of simplified geometry from a central server are discussed and finally and LOD selection algorithm to support interactive rendering of hard and soft shadows is described

Resource optimization and dynamic state management in a collaborative virtual environment.

Yim-Pan Chui.Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2001.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 126-132).Abstracts in English and Chinese.Abstract --- p.iiAcknowledgments --- p.vChapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1Chapter 1.1 --- Introduction to Collaborative Virtual Environments --- p.1Chapter 1.2 --- Barriers to Resource Management and Optimization --- p.3Chapter 1.3 --- Thesis Contributions --- p.5Chapter 1.4 --- Application of this Research Work --- p.6Chapter 1.5 --- Thesis Organization --- p.6Chapter 2 --- Resource Optimization - Intelligent Server Partitioning --- p.9Chapter 2.1 --- Introduction --- p.9Chapter 2.2 --- Server Partitioning --- p.13Chapter 2.2.1 --- Related Works --- p.15Chapter 2.2.2 --- Global Optimization Approaches --- p.17Chapter 2.3 --- Hybrid Genetic Algorithm Paradigm --- p.17Chapter 2.3.1 --- Drawbacks of traditional GA --- p.18Chapter 2.3.2 --- Problem Modeling --- p.19Chapter 2.3.3 --- Discussion --- p.24Chapter 2.4 --- Results --- p.25Chapter 2.5 --- Concluding Remarks --- p.28Chapter 3 --- Dynamic State Management - Dead Reckoning of Attitude --- p.32Chapter 3.1 --- Introduction to Dynamic State Management --- p.32Chapter 3.2 --- The Dead Reckoning Approach --- p.35Chapter 3.3 --- Attitude Dead Reckoning by Quaternion --- p.37Chapter 3.3.1 --- Modeling of the Paradigm --- p.38Chapter 3.3.2 --- Prediction Step --- p.39Chapter 3.3.3 --- Convergence Step --- p.40Chapter 3.3.4 --- Overall Algorithm --- p.46Chapter 3.4 --- Results --- p.47Chapter 3.5 --- Conclusion --- p.51Chapter 4 --- Polynomial Attitude Extrapolation --- p.52Chapter 4.1 --- Introduction --- p.52Chapter 4.2 --- Related Works on Kalman Filtering --- p.53Chapter 4.3 --- Historical Propagation of Quaternion --- p.54Chapter 4.3.1 --- Cumulative Extrapolation --- p.54Chapter 4.3.2 --- Method I. Vandemonde Approach --- p.55Chapter 4.3.3 --- Method II. Lagrangian Approach --- p.58Chapter 4.4 --- History-Based Attitude Management --- p.60Chapter 4.4.1 --- Multi-order Prediction --- p.60Chapter 4.4.2 --- Adaptive Attitude Convergence --- p.63Chapter 4.4.3 --- Overall Algorithm --- p.67Chapter 4.5 --- Results --- p.69Chapter 4.6 --- Conclusion --- p.77Chapter 5 --- Forward Difference Approach on State Estimation --- p.78Chapter 5.1 --- Introduction --- p.78Chapter 5.2 --- Positional Forward Differencing --- p.79Chapter 5.3 --- Forward Difference on Quaternion Space --- p.80Chapter 5.3.1 --- Attitude Forward Differencing --- p.83Chapter 5.3.2 --- Trajectory Blending --- p.84Chapter 5.4 --- State Estimation --- p.86Chapter 5.5 --- Computational Efficiency --- p.87Chapter 5.6 --- Results --- p.88Chapter 5.7 --- Conclusion --- p.96Chapter 6 --- Predictive Multibody Kinematics --- p.98Chapter 6.1 --- Introduction --- p.98Chapter 6.2 --- Dynamic Management of Multibody System --- p.100Chapter 6.2.1 --- Multibody Representation --- p.100Chapter 6.2.2 --- Paradigm Overview --- p.101Chapter 6.3 --- Motion Estimation by Joint Extrapolation --- p.102Chapter 6.3.1 --- Individual Joint Extrapolation --- p.102Chapter 6.3.2 --- Forward Propagation of Joint State --- p.104Chapter 6.3.3 --- Pose Correction --- p.107Chapter 6.4 --- Limitations on Predictive Articulated State Management --- p.108Chapter 6.5 --- Implementation and Results --- p.109Chapter 6.6 --- Conclusion --- p.112Chapter 7 --- Complete System Architecture --- p.113Chapter 7.1 --- Server Cluster Model --- p.113Chapter 7.1.1 --- Peer-Server Systems --- p.114Chapter 7.1.2 --- Server Hierarchies --- p.114Chapter 7.2 --- Multi-Level Resource Management --- p.115Chapter 7.3 --- Aggregation of State Updates --- p.116Chapter 7.4 --- Implementation Issues --- p.117Chapter 7.4.1 --- Medical Visualization --- p.117Chapter 7.4.2 --- Virtual Walkthrough Application --- p.118Chapter 7.5 --- Conclusion --- p.119Chapter 8 --- Conclusions and Future directions --- p.121Chapter 8.1 --- Conclusion --- p.121Chapter 8.2 --- Future Research Directions --- p.122Chapter A --- Quaternion Basis --- p.124Chapter A.1 --- Basic Quaternion Mathematics --- p.124Chapter A.2 --- The Exponential and Logarithmic Maps --- p.125Bibliography --- p.12

Towards a High Quality Real-Time Graphics Pipeline

Modern graphics hardware pipelines create photorealistic images with high geometric complexity in real time. The quality is constantly improving and advanced techniques from feature film visual effects, such as high dynamic range images and support for higher-order surface primitives, have recently been adopted. Visual effect techniques have large computational costs and significant memory bandwidth usage. In this thesis, we identify three problem areas and propose new algorithms that increase the performance of a set of computer graphics techniques. Our main focus is on efficient algorithms for the real-time graphics pipeline, but parts of our research are equally applicable to offline rendering. Our first focus is texture compression, which is a technique to reduce the memory bandwidth usage. The core idea is to store images in small compressed blocks which are sent over the memory bus and are decompressed on-the-fly when accessed. We present compression algorithms for two types of texture formats. High dynamic range images capture environment lighting with luminance differences over a wide intensity range. Normal maps store perturbation vectors for local surface normals, and give the illusion of high geometric surface detail. Our compression formats are tailored to these texture types and have compression ratios of 6:1, high visual fidelity, and low-cost decompression logic. Our second focus is tessellation culling. Culling is a commonly used technique in computer graphics for removing work that does not contribute to the final image, such as completely hidden geometry. By discarding rendering primitives from further processing, substantial arithmetic computations and memory bandwidth can be saved. Modern graphics processing units include flexible tessellation stages, where rendering primitives are subdivided for increased geometric detail. Images with highly detailed models can be synthesized, but the incurred cost is significant. We have devised a simple remapping technique that allowsfor better tessellation distribution in screen space. Furthermore, we present programmable tessellation culling, where bounding volumes for displaced geometry are computed and used to conservatively test if a primitive can be discarded before tessellation. We introduce a general tessellation culling framework, and an optimized algorithm for rendering of displaced Bézier patches, which is expected to be a common use case for graphics hardware tessellation. Our third and final focus is forward-looking, and relates to efficient algorithms for stochastic rasterization, a rendering technique where camera effects such as depth of field and motion blur can be faithfully simulated. We extend a graphics pipeline with stochastic rasterization in spatio-temporal space and show that stochastic motion blur can be rendered with rather modest pipeline modifications. Furthermore, backface culling algorithms for motion blur and depth of field rendering are presented, which are directly applicable to stochastic rasterization. Hopefully, our work in this field brings us closer to high quality real-time stochastic rendering

An efficient active B-spline/nurbs model for virtual sculpting

This thesis presents an Efficient Active B-Spline/Nurbs Model for Virtual Sculpting. In spite of the on-going rapid development of computer graphics and computer-aided design tools, 3D graphics designers still rely on non-intuitive modelling procedures for the creation and manipulation of freeform virtual content. The ’Virtual Sculpting' paradigm is a well-established mechanism for shielding designers from the complex mathematics that underpin freeform shape design. The premise is to emulate familiar elements of traditional clay sculpting within the virtual design environment. Purely geometric techniques can mimic some physical properties. More exact energy-based approaches struggle to do so at interactive rates. This thesis establishes a unified approach for the representation of physically aware, energy-based, deformable models, across the domains of Computer Graphics, Computer-Aided Design and Computer Vision, and formalises the theoretical relationships between them. A novel reformulation of the computer vision approach of Active Contour Models (ACMs) is proposed for the domain of Virtual Sculpting. The proposed ACM-based model offers novel interaction behaviours and captures a compromise between purely geometric and more exact energy-based approaches, facilitating physically plausible results at interactive rates. Predefined shape primitives provide features of interest, acting like sculpting tools such that the overall deformation of an Active Surface Model is analogous to traditional clay modelling. The thesis develops a custom-approach to provide full support for B-Splines, the de facto standard industry representation of freeform surfaces, which have not previously benefited from the seamless embodiment of a true Virtual Sculpting metaphor. A novel generalised computationally efficient mathematical framework for the energy minimisation of an Active B-Spline Surface is established. The resulting algorithm is shown to significantly reduce computation times and has broader applications across the domains of Computer-Aided Design, Computer Graphics, and Computer Vision. A prototype ’Virtual Sculpting’ environment encapsulating each of the outlined approaches is presented that demonstrates their effectiveness towards addressing the long-standing need for a computationally efficient and intuitive solution to the problem of interactive computer-based freeform shape design