Image-Based Hair Capture by Inverse Lighting

International audienceWe introduce an image-based method for modeling a specific subject's hair. The principle of the approach is to study the variations of hair illumination under controlled illumination. The use of a stationary viewpoint and the assumption that the subject is still allows us to work with perfectly registered images: all pixels in an image sequence represent the same portion of the hair, and the particular illumination profile observed at each pixel can be used to infer the missing degree of directional information. This is accomplished by synthesizing reflection profiles using a hair reflectance model, for a number of candidate directions at each pixel, and choosing the orientation that provides the best profile match. Our results demonstrate the potential of this approach, by effectively reconstructing accurate hair strands that are well highlighted by a particular light source movement

Ants Sow the Seeds of Global Diversification in Flowering Plants

Background: The extraordinary diversification of angiosperm plants in the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods has produced an estimated 250,000–300,000 living angiosperm species and has fundamentally altered terrestrial ecosystems. Interactions with animals as pollinators or seed dispersers have long been suspected as drivers of angiosperm diversification, yet empirical examples remain sparse or inconclusive. Seed dispersal by ants (myrmecochory) may drive diversification as it can reduce extinction by providing selective advantages to plants and can increase speciation by enhancing geographical isolation by extremely limited dispersal distances. Methodology/Principal Findings: Using the most comprehensive sister-group comparison to date, we tested the hypothesis that myrmecochory leads to higher diversification rates in angiosperm plants. As predicted, diversification rates were substantially higher in ant-dispersed plants than in their non-myrmecochorous relatives. Data from 101 angiosperm lineages in 241 genera from all continents except Antarctica revealed that ant-dispersed lineages contained on average more than twice as many species as did their non-myrmecochorous sister groups. Contrasts in species diversity between sister groups demonstrated that diversification rates did not depend on seed dispersal mode in the sister group and were higher in myrmecochorous lineages in most biogeographic regions. Conclusions/Significance: Myrmecochory, which has evolved independently at least 100 times in angiosperms and is estimated to be present in at least 77 families and 11 000 species, is a key evolutionary innovation and a globally important driver of plant diversity. Myrmecochory provides the best example to date for a consistent effect of any mutualism on largescale diversification

Parameterized Animation Compression

We generalize image-based rendering by exploiting texture-mapping graphics hardware to decompress ray-traced "animations". Rather than 1D time, our animations are parameterized by two or more arbitrary variables representing view/lighting changes and rigid object motions. To best match the graphics hardware rendering to the input ray-traced imagery, we describe a novel method to infer parameterized texture maps for each object by modeling the hardware as a linear system and then performing least-squares optimization. The parameterized textures are compressed as a multidimensional Laplacian pyramid on fixed size blocks of parameter space. This scheme captures the coherence in parameterized animations and, unlike previous work, decodes directly into texture maps that load into hardware with a few, simple image operations. We introduce adaptive dimension splitting in the Laplacian pyramid and separate diffuse and specular lighting layers to further improve compression. High-quality results are demonstrated at compression ratios up to 800:1 with interactive playback on current consumer graphics cards

Image-Based Hair Capture by Inverse Lighting

International audienceWe introduce an image-based method for modeling a specific subject's hair. The principle of the approach is to study the variations of hair illumination under controlled illumination. The use of a stationary viewpoint and the assumption that the subject is still allows us to work with perfectly registered images: all pixels in an image sequence represent the same portion of the hair, and the particular illumination profile observed at each pixel can be used to infer the missing degree of directional information. This is accomplished by synthesizing reflection profiles using a hair reflectance model, for a number of candidate directions at each pixel, and choosing the orientation that provides the best profile match. Our results demonstrate the potential of this approach, by effectively reconstructing accurate hair strands that are well highlighted by a particular light source movement

sPlotOpen:an environmentally balanced, open-access, global dataset of vegetation plots

Abstract Motivation: Assessing biodiversity status and trends in plant communities is critical for understanding, quantifying and predicting the effects of global change on ecosystems. Vegetation plots record the occurrence or abundance of all plant species co-occurring within delimited local areas. This allows species absences to be inferred, information seldom provided by existing global plant datasets. Although many vegetation plots have been recorded, most are not available to the global research community. A recent initiative, called ‘sPlot’, compiled the first global vegetation plot database, and continues to grow and curate it. The sPlot database, however, is extremely unbalanced spatially and environmentally, and is not open-access. Here, we address both these issues by (a) resampling the vegetation plots using several environmental variables as sampling strata and (b) securing permission from data holders of 105 local-to-regional datasets to openly release data. We thus present sPlotOpen, the largest open-access dataset of vegetation plots ever released. sPlotOpen can be used to explore global diversity at the plant community level, as ground truth data in remote sensing applications, or as a baseline for biodiversity monitoring. Main types of variable contained: Vegetation plots (n = 95,104) recording cover or abundance of naturally co-occurring vascular plant species within delimited areas. sPlotOpen contains three partially overlapping resampled datasets (c. 50,000 plots each), to be used as replicates in global analyses. Besides geographical location, date, plot size, biome, elevation, slope, aspect, vegetation type, naturalness, coverage of various vegetation layers, and source dataset, plot-level data also include community-weighted means and variances of 18 plant functional traits from the TRY Plant Trait Database. Spatial location and grain: Global, 0.01–40,000 m². Time period and grain: 1888–2015, recording dates. Major taxa and level of measurement: 42,677 vascular plant taxa, plot-level records. Software format: Three main matrices (.csv), relationally linked