From 3D Point Clouds to Pose-Normalised Depth Maps

We consider the problem of generating either pairwise-aligned or pose-normalised depth maps from noisy 3D point clouds in a relatively unrestricted poses. Our system is deployed in a 3D face alignment application and consists of the following four stages: (i) data filtering, (ii) nose tip identification and sub-vertex localisation, (iii) computation of the (relative) face orientation, (iv) generation of either a pose aligned or a pose normalised depth map. We generate an implicit radial basis function (RBF) model of the facial surface and this is employed within all four stages of the process. For example, in stage (ii), construction of novel invariant features is based on sampling this RBF over a set of concentric spheres to give a spherically-sampled RBF (SSR) shape histogram. In stage (iii), a second novel descriptor, called an isoradius contour curvature signal, is defined, which allows rotational alignment to be determined using a simple process of 1D correlation. We test our system on both the University of York (UoY) 3D face dataset and the Face Recognition Grand Challenge (FRGC) 3D data. For the more challenging UoY data, our SSR descriptors significantly outperform three variants of spin images, successfully identifying nose vertices at a rate of 99.6%. Nose localisation performance on the higher quality FRGC data, which has only small pose variations, is 99.9%. Our best system successfully normalises the pose of 3D faces at rates of 99.1% (UoY data) and 99.6% (FRGC data)

Fine-grained visualization pipelines and lazy functional languages

The pipeline model in visualization has evolved from a conceptual model of data processing into a widely used architecture for implementing visualization systems. In the process, a number of capabilities have been introduced, including streaming of data in chunks, distributed pipelines, and demand-driven processing. Visualization systems have invariably built on stateful programming technologies, and these capabilities have had to be implemented explicitly within the lower layers of a complex hierarchy of services. The good news for developers is that applications built on top of this hierarchy can access these capabilities without concern for how they are implemented. The bad news is that by freezing capabilities into low-level services expressive power and flexibility is lost. In this paper we express visualization systems in a programming language that more naturally supports this kind of processing model. Lazy functional languages support fine-grained demand-driven processing, a natural form of streaming, and pipeline-like function composition for assembling applications. The technology thus appears well suited to visualization applications. Using surface extraction algorithms as illustrative examples, and the lazy functional language Haskell, we argue the benefits of clear and concise expression combined with fine-grained, demand-driven computation. Just as visualization provides insight into data, functional abstraction provides new insight into visualization

Volume-Enclosing Surface Extraction

In this paper we present a new method, which allows for the construction of triangular isosurfaces from three-dimensional data sets, such as 3D image data and/or numerical simulation data that are based on regularly shaped, cubic lattices. This novel volume-enclosing surface extraction technique, which has been named VESTA, can produce up to six different results due to the nature of the discretized 3D space under consideration. VESTA is neither template-based nor it is necessarily required to operate on 2x2x2 voxel cell neighborhoods only. The surface tiles are determined with a very fast and robust construction technique while potential ambiguities are detected and resolved. Here, we provide an in-depth comparison between VESTA and various versions of the well-known and very popular Marching Cubes algorithm for the very first time. In an application section, we demonstrate the extraction of VESTA isosurfaces for various data sets ranging from computer tomographic scan data to simulation data of relativistic hydrodynamic fireball expansions.Comment: 24 pages, 33 figures, 4 tables, final versio

Computational field visualization

ManuscriptToday, scientists, engineers, and medical researchers routinely use computers to simulate complex physical phenomena. Such simulations present new challenges for computational scientists, including the need to effectively analyze and visualize complex three-dimensional data. As simulations become more complex and produce larger amounts of data, the effectiveness of utilizing such high resolution data will hinge upon the ability of human experts to interact with their data and extract useful information. Here we describe recent work at the SCI Institute in large-scale scalar, vector, and tensor visualization techniques. We end with a discussion of ideas for the integration of techniques for creating computational multi-field visualizations

Hierarchical Large-scale Volume Representation with 3rd-root-of-2 Subdivision and Trivariate B-spline Wavelets

Multiresolution methods provide a means for representing data at multiple levels of detail. They are typically based on a hierarchical data organization scheme and update rules needed for data value computation. We use a data organization that is based on what we call $\sqrt[n]{2}$ subdivision. The main advantage of $\sqrt[n]{2}$ subdivision, compared to quadtree (n=2) or octree (n=3) organizations, is that the number of vertices is only doubled in each subdivision step instead of multiplied by a factor of four or eight, respectively. To update data values we use n-variate B-spline wavelets, which yield better approximations for each level of detail. We develop a lifting scheme for n=2 and n=3 based on the $\sqrt[n]{2}$-subdivision scheme. We obtain narrow masks that provide a basis for out-of-core techniques as well as view-dependent visualization and adaptive, localized refinement