Christopher Brand: looking forward.

Mode of access: Internet

Protecting Lake Taupo: the strategy and the lessons

The New Zealand Kellogg Rural Leaders Programme develops emerging agribusiness leaders to help shape the future of New Zealand agribusiness and rural affairs. Lincoln University has been involved with this leaders programme since 1979 when it was launched with a grant from the Kellogg Foundation, USA.The 'Protecting Lake Taupo' project is the largest environmental protection project of its type in New Zealand. The Waikato Regional council (Environment Waikato) charged with protecting the lake, sought to vary the regional plan to address and regulate land use activities affecting the quality and clarity of Lake Taupo. This research paper looks briefly at the history and development of the protection of the lake, but predominantly covers the emergence of the protection strategy - the past 8-9 years and what can be learned from that

In Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2004, Sketches and Applications track

Introduction Traditionally, displacement maps have been rendered with micropolygons [Cook et al. 1987]. In both raytracers and real-time systems, these high polygon counts lead to memory/bandwidth inefficiency, and high geometric transformation costs, which limit performance. Recently, displacement maps have also been directly rendered in raytracing, using iterative root-finding methods [Heidrich and Seidel 1998]. Here, we propose a similar ray intersection approach for real-time rendering. However, an iterative solution is infeasible in graphics hardware due to the limitations on texture indirections. A texture indirection occurs when the results of one texture access affect the coordinates of subsequent accesses, such as in each step of an iterative solution. These are currently limited to 4 on Radeon 9700/9800 where in contrast, a possible total of 32 texture accesses are allowed per fragment. This has led us to the hybrid sampling/iterative approach described here 2 Algorithm O

Dynamic Textures for Image-based Rendering of Fine-Scale 3D Structure and Animation of Non-rigid Motion

The problem of capturing real world scenes and then accurately rendering them is particularly difficult for finescale 3D structure. Similarly, it is difficult to capture, model and animate non-rigid motion. We present a method where small image changes are captured as a time varying (dynamic) texture. In particular, a coarse geometry is obtained from a sample set of images using structure from motion. This geometry is then used to subdivide the scene and to extract approximately stabilized texture patches. The residual statistical variability in the texture patches is captured using a PCA basis of spatial filters. The filters coefficients are parameterized in camera pose and object motion. To render new poses and motions, new texture patches are synthesized by modulating the texture basis. The texture is then warped back onto the coarse geometry. We demonstrate how the texture modulation and projective homography-based warps can be achieved in real-time using hardware accelerated OpenGL

Editing real world scenes: Augmented reality with image-based rendering

We present a method that using only an uncalibrated camera allows the capture of object geometry and appearance, and then at a later stage registration and AR overlay into a new scene. Using only image information first a coarse object geometry is obtained using structure-from-motion, then a dynamic, view dependent texture is estimated to account for the differences between the reprojected coarse model and the training images. In AR rendering, the object structure is interactively aligned in one frame by the user, object and scene structure is registered, and rendered in subsequent frames by a virtual scene camera, with parameters estimated from real-time visual tracking. Using the same viewing geometry for both object acquisition, registration, and rendering ensures consistency and minimizes errors