14,509 research outputs found
A survey of real-time crowd rendering
In this survey we review, classify and compare existing approaches for real-time crowd rendering. We first overview character animation techniques, as they are highly tied to crowd rendering performance, and then we analyze the state of the art in crowd rendering. We discuss different representations for level-of-detail (LoD) rendering of animated characters, including polygon-based, point-based, and image-based techniques, and review different criteria for runtime LoD selection. Besides LoD approaches, we review classic acceleration schemes, such as frustum culling and occlusion culling, and describe how they can be adapted to handle crowds of animated characters. We also discuss specific acceleration techniques for crowd rendering, such as primitive pseudo-instancing, palette skinning, and dynamic key-pose caching, which benefit from current graphics hardware. We also address other factors affecting performance and realism of crowds such as lighting, shadowing, clothing and variability. Finally we provide an exhaustive comparison of the most relevant approaches in the field.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
Virtual Rephotography: Novel View Prediction Error for 3D Reconstruction
The ultimate goal of many image-based modeling systems is to render
photo-realistic novel views of a scene without visible artifacts. Existing
evaluation metrics and benchmarks focus mainly on the geometric accuracy of the
reconstructed model, which is, however, a poor predictor of visual accuracy.
Furthermore, using only geometric accuracy by itself does not allow evaluating
systems that either lack a geometric scene representation or utilize coarse
proxy geometry. Examples include light field or image-based rendering systems.
We propose a unified evaluation approach based on novel view prediction error
that is able to analyze the visual quality of any method that can render novel
views from input images. One of the key advantages of this approach is that it
does not require ground truth geometry. This dramatically simplifies the
creation of test datasets and benchmarks. It also allows us to evaluate the
quality of an unknown scene during the acquisition and reconstruction process,
which is useful for acquisition planning. We evaluate our approach on a range
of methods including standard geometry-plus-texture pipelines as well as
image-based rendering techniques, compare it to existing geometry-based
benchmarks, and demonstrate its utility for a range of use cases.Comment: 10 pages, 12 figures, paper was submitted to ACM Transactions on
Graphics for revie
Neural 3D Morphable Models: Spiral Convolutional Networks for 3D Shape Representation Learning and Generation
Generative models for 3D geometric data arise in many important applications
in 3D computer vision and graphics. In this paper, we focus on 3D deformable
shapes that share a common topological structure, such as human faces and
bodies. Morphable Models and their variants, despite their linear formulation,
have been widely used for shape representation, while most of the recently
proposed nonlinear approaches resort to intermediate representations, such as
3D voxel grids or 2D views. In this work, we introduce a novel graph
convolutional operator, acting directly on the 3D mesh, that explicitly models
the inductive bias of the fixed underlying graph. This is achieved by enforcing
consistent local orderings of the vertices of the graph, through the spiral
operator, thus breaking the permutation invariance property that is adopted by
all the prior work on Graph Neural Networks. Our operator comes by construction
with desirable properties (anisotropic, topology-aware, lightweight,
easy-to-optimise), and by using it as a building block for traditional deep
generative architectures, we demonstrate state-of-the-art results on a variety
of 3D shape datasets compared to the linear Morphable Model and other graph
convolutional operators.Comment: to appear at ICCV 201
An Overview of Rendering from Volume Data --- including Surface and Volume Rendering
Volume rendering is a title often ambiguously used in science. One meaning often quoted is: `to render any three volume dimensional data set'; however, within this categorisation `surface rendering'' is contained. Surface rendering is a technique for visualising a geometric representation of a surface from a three dimensional volume data set. A more correct definition of Volume Rendering would only incorporate the direct visualisation of volumes, without the use of intermediate surface geometry representations. Hence we state: `Volume Rendering is the Direct Visualisation of any three dimensional Volume data set; without the use of an intermediate geometric representation for isosurfaces'; `Surface Rendering is the Visualisation of a surface, from a geometric approximation of an isosurface, within a Volume data set'; where an isosurface is a surface formed from a cross connection of data points, within a volume, of equal value or density. This paper is an overview of both Surface Rendering and Volume Rendering techniques. Surface Rendering mainly consists of contouring lines over data points and triangulations between contours. Volume rendering methods consist of ray casting techniques that allow the ray to be cast from the viewing plane into the object and the transparency, opacity and colour calculated for each cell; the rays are often cast until an opaque object is `hit' or the ray exits the volume
Geometric deep learning: going beyond Euclidean data
Many scientific fields study data with an underlying structure that is a
non-Euclidean space. Some examples include social networks in computational
social sciences, sensor networks in communications, functional networks in
brain imaging, regulatory networks in genetics, and meshed surfaces in computer
graphics. In many applications, such geometric data are large and complex (in
the case of social networks, on the scale of billions), and are natural targets
for machine learning techniques. In particular, we would like to use deep
neural networks, which have recently proven to be powerful tools for a broad
range of problems from computer vision, natural language processing, and audio
analysis. However, these tools have been most successful on data with an
underlying Euclidean or grid-like structure, and in cases where the invariances
of these structures are built into networks used to model them. Geometric deep
learning is an umbrella term for emerging techniques attempting to generalize
(structured) deep neural models to non-Euclidean domains such as graphs and
manifolds. The purpose of this paper is to overview different examples of
geometric deep learning problems and present available solutions, key
difficulties, applications, and future research directions in this nascent
field
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