31-Issue 2

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https://diglib.eg.org/handle/10.2312/171

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Metering for Exposure Stacks
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2012) Gallo, Orazio; Tico, Marius; Manduchi, Roberto; Gelfand, Natasha; Pulli, Kari; P. Cignoni and T. Ertl
When creating a High-Dynamic-Range (HDR) image from a sequence of differently exposed Low-Dynamic-Range (LDR) images, the set of LDR images is usually generated by sampling the space of exposure times with a geometric progression and without explicitly accounting for the distribution of irradiance values of the scene. We argue that this choice can produce sub-optimal results both in terms of the number of acquired pictures and the quality of the resulting HDR image. This paper presents a method to estimate the full irradiance histogram of a scene, and a strategy to select the set of exposures that need to be acquired. Our selection usually requires a smaller or equal set of LDRs, yet produces higher quality HDR images.
A Cell-Based Light Interaction Model for Human Blood
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2012) Yim, Daniel; Baranoski, Gladimir V. G.; Kimmel, Brad W.; Chen, T. Francis; Miranda, Erik; P. Cignoni and T. Ertl
The development of predictive appearance models for organic tissues is a challenging task due to the inherent complexity of these materials. In this paper, we closely examine the biophysical processes responsible for the appearance attributes of whole blood, one the most fundamental of these materials. We describe a new appearance model that simulates the mechanisms of light propagation and absorption within the cellular and fluid portions of this specialized tissue. The proposed model employs a comprehensive, and yet flexible first principles approach based on the morphological, optical and biochemical properties of blood cells. This approach allows for environment driven changes in the cells' anatomy and orientation to be appropriately included into the light transport simulations. The correctness and predictive capabilities of the proposed model are quantitatively and qualitatively evaluated through comparisons of modeled results with actual measured data and experimental observations reported in the scientific literature. Its incorporation into rendering systems is illustrated through images of blood samples depicting appearance variations controlled by physiologically meaningful parameters. Besides the contributions to the modeling of material appearance, the research presented in this paper is also expected to have applications in a wide range of biomedical areas, from optical diagnostics to the visualization and noninvasive imaging of blood-perfused tissues.
Interactive Multi-perspective Imagery from Photos and Videos
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2012) Lieng, Henrik; Tompkin, James; Kautz, Jan; P. Cignoni and T. Ertl
Photographs usually show a scene from a single perspective. However, as commonly seen in art, scenes and objects can be visualized from multiple perspectives. Making such images manually is time consuming and tedious. We propose a novel system for designing multi-perspective images and videos. First, the images in the input sequence are aligned using structure from motion. This enables us to track feature points across the sequence. Second, the user chooses portal polygons in a target image into which different perspectives are to be embedded. The corresponding image regions from the other images are then copied into these portals. Due to the tracking feature and automatic warping, this approach is considerably faster than current tools. We explore a wide range of artistic applications using our system with image and video data, such as looking around corners and up and down stair cases, recursive multi-perspective imaging, cubism and panoramas.
Black is Green: Adaptive Color Transformation For Reduced Ink Usage
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2012) Shapira, Lior; Oicherman, Boris; P. Cignoni and T. Ertl
A vast majority of color transformations applied to an image in the digital press industry are static and precalculated. In order to achieve the best quality on a wide variety of different images, these transformations tend to be highly conservative with respect to the use of black ink. This results in excessive use of inks, which has a negative economic and environmental impact. We present a method for dynamic computation of color transformation based on image content, with the aim to reduce ink usage. We analyze the image, and predict areas in which quality artifacts that may result from such a reduction will be masked by the image content. These areas include detailed textures, noisy areas and structure. We then replace the image CMYK values by a new combination with increased black. Our algorithm ensures negligible color shifts in the resulting image, and no visible reduction in quality. We achieve an average of over 10% ink savings.
Procedural Interpolation of Historical City Maps
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2012) Krecklau, Lars; Manthei, Christopher; Kobbelt, Leif; P. Cignoni and T. Ertl
We propose a novel approach for the temporal interpolation of city maps. The input to our algorithm is a sparse set of historical city maps plus optional additional knowledge about construction or destruction events. The output is a fast forward animation of the city map development where roads and buildings are constructed and destroyed over time in order to match the sparse historical facts and to look plausible where no precise facts are available. A smooth transition between any real-world data could be interesting for educational purposes, because our system conveys an intuition of the city development. The insertion of data, like when and where a certain building or road existed, is efficiently performed by an intuitive graphical user interface. Our system collects all this information into a global dependency graph of events. By propagating time intervals through the dependency graph we can automatically derive the earliest and latest possible date for each event which are guaranteeing temporal as well as geographical consistency (e.g. buildings can only appear along roads that have been constructed before). During the simulation of the city development, events are scheduled according to a score function that rates the plausibility of the development (e.g. cities grow along major roads). Finally, the events are properly distributed over time to control the dynamics of the city development. Based on the city map animation we create a procedural city model in order to render a 3D animation of the city development over decades.
Importance Caching for Complex Illumination
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2012) Georgiev, Iliyan; Krivánek, Jaroslav; Popov, Stefan; Slusallek, Philipp; P. Cignoni and T. Ertl
Realistic rendering requires computing the global illumination in the scene, and Monte Carlo integration is the best-known method for doing that. The key to good performance is to carefully select the costly integration samples, which is usually achieved via importance sampling. Unfortunately, visibility is difficult to factor into the importance distribution, which can greatly increase variance in highly occluded scenes with complex illumination. In this paper, we present importance caching - a novel approach that selects those samples with a distribution that includes visibility, while maintaining efficiency by exploiting illumination smoothness. At a sparse set of locations in the scene, we construct and cache several types of probability distributions with respect to a set of virtual point lights (VPLs), which notably include visibility. Each distribution type is optimized for a specific lighting condition. For every shading point, we then borrow the distributions from nearby cached locations and use them for VPL sampling, avoiding additional bias. A novel multiple importance sampling framework finally combines the many estimators. In highly occluded scenes, where visibility is a major source of variance in the incident radiance, our approach can reduce variance by more than an order of magnitude. Even in such complex scenes we can obtain accurate and low noise previews with full global illumination in a couple of seconds on a single mid-range CPU.
Robust Image Retargeting via Axis-Aligned Deformation
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2012) Panozzo, Daniele; Weber, Ofir; Sorkine, Olga; P. Cignoni and T. Ertl
We propose the space of axis-aligned deformations as the meaningful space for content-aware image retargeting. Such deformations exclude local rotations, avoiding harmful visual distortions, and they are parameterized in 1D. We show that standard warping energies for image retargeting can be minimized in the space of axis-aligned deformations while guaranteeing that bijectivity constraints are satisfied, leading to high-quality, smooth and robust retargeting results. Thanks to the 1D parameterization, our method only requires solving a small quadratic program, which can be done within a few milliseconds on the CPU with no precomputation overhead. We demonstrate how the image size and the saliency map can be changed in real time with our approach, and present results on various input images, including the RETARGETME benchmark. We compare our results with six other algorithms in a user study to demonstrate that the space of axis-aligned deformations is suitable for the problem at hand.
Data Driven Surface Reflectance from Sparse and Irregular Samples
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2012) Ruiters, Roland; Schwartz, Christopher; Klein, Reinhard; P. Cignoni and T. Ertl
In recent years, measuring surface reflectance has become an established method for high quality renderings. In this context, especially non-parametric representations got a lot of attention as they allow for a very accurate representation of complex reflectance behavior. However, the acquisition of this data is a challenging task especially if complex object geometry is involved. Capturing images of the object under varying illumination and view conditions results in irregular angular samplings of the reflectance function with a limited angular resolution. Classical data-driven techniques, like tensor factorization, are not well suited for such data sets as they require a resampling of the high dimensional measurement data to a regular grid. This grid has to be on a much higher angular resolution to avoid resampling artifacts which in turn would lead to data sets of enormous size. To overcome these problems we introduce a novel, compact data-driven representation of reflectance functions based on a sum of separable functions which are fitted directly to the irregular set of data without any further resampling. The representation allows for efficient rendering and is also well suited for GPU applications. By exploiting spatial coherence of the reflectance function over the object a very precise reconstruction even of specular materials becomes possible already with a sparse input sampling. This would be impossible using standard data interpolation techniques. Since our algorithm exclusively operates on the compressed representation, it is both efficient in terms of memory use and computational complexity, depending only sub-linearly on the size of the fully tabulated data. The quality of the reflectance function is evaluated on synthetic data sets as ground truth as well as on real world measurements.
Procedural Texture Preview
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2012) Lasram, Anass; Lefebvre, Sylvain; Damez, Cyrille; P. Cignoni and T. Ertl
Procedural textures usually require spending time testing parameters to realize the diversity of appearances. This paper introduces the idea of a procedural texture preview: A single static image summarizing in a limited pixel space the appearances produced by a given procedure. Unlike grids of thumbnails our previews present a continuous image of appearances, analog to a map. The main challenge is to ensure that most appearances are visible, are allocated a similar pixel area, and are ordered in a smooth manner throughout the preview. To reach this goal, we introduce a new layout algorithm accounting simultaneously for these criteria. After computing a layout of appearances, we rely on by-example texture synthesis to produce the final preview. We demonstrate our approach on a database of production-level procedural textures.
crdbrd: Shape Fabrication by Sliding Planar Slices
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2012) Hildebrand, Kristian; Bickel, Bernd; Alexa, Marc; P. Cignoni and T. Ertl
We introduce an algorithm and representation for fabricating 3D shape abstractions using mutually intersecting planar cut-outs. The planes have prefabricated slits at their intersections and are assembled by sliding them together. Often such abstractions are used as a sculptural art form or in architecture and are colloquially called 'cardboard sculptures'. Based on an analysis of construction rules, we propose an extended binary space partitioning tree as an efficient representation of such cardboard models which allows us to quickly evaluate the feasibility of newly added planar elements. The complexity of insertion order quickly increases with the number of planar elements and manual analysis becomes intractable. We provide tools for generating cardboard sculptures with guaranteed constructibility. In combination with a simple optimization and sampling strategy for new elements, planar shape abstraction models can be designed by iteratively adding elements. As an output, we obtain a fabrication plan that can be printed or sent to a laser cutter. We demonstrate the complete process by designing and fabricating cardboard models of various well-known 3D shapes.
Repetition Maximization based Texture Rectification
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2012) Aiger, Dror; Cohen-Or, Daniel; Mitra, Niloy J.; P. Cignoni and T. Ertl
Many photographs are taken in perspective. Techniques for rectifying resulting perspective distortions typically rely on the existence of parallel lines in the scene. In scenarios where such parallel lines are hard to automatically extract or manually annotate, the unwarping process remains a challenge. In this paper, we introduce an automatic algorithm to rectifying images containing textures of repeated elements lying on an unknown plane. We unwrap the input by maximizing for image self-similarity over the space of homography transformations. We map a set of detected regional descriptors to surfaces in a transformation space, compute the intersection points among triplets of such surfaces, and then use consensus among the projected intersection points to extract the correcting transform. Our algorithm is global, robust, and does not require explicit or accurate detection of similar elements. We evaluate our method on a variety of challenging textures and images. The rectified outputs are directly useful for various tasks including texture synthesis, image completion, etc.
Interactive Self-Organizing Windows
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2012) Steinberger, Markus; Waldner, Manuela; Schmalstieg, Dieter; P. Cignoni and T. Ertl
In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a dynamic window management technique that changes the perception of windows as fixed-sized rectangles. The primary goal of self-organizing windows is to automatically display the most relevant information for a user's current activity, which removes the burden of organizing and arranging windows from the user. We analyze the image-based representation of each window and identify coherent pieces of information. The windows are then automatically moved, scaled and composed in a contentaware manner to fit the most relevant information into the limited area of the screen. During the design process, we consider findings from previous experiments and show how users can benefit from our system. We also describe how the immense processing power of current graphics processing units can be exploited to build an interactive system that finds an optimal solution within the complex design space of all possible window transformations in real time.
Practical Spectral Photography
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2012) Habel, Ralf; Kudenov, Michael; Wimmer, Michael; P. Cignoni and T. Ertl
We introduce a low-cost and compact spectral imaging camera design based on unmodified consumer cameras and a custom camera objective. The device can be used in a high-resolution configuration that measures the spectrum of a column of an imaged scene with up to 0.8 nm spectral resolution, rivalling commercial non-imaging spectrometers, and a mid-resolution hyperspectral mode that allows the spectral measurement of a whole image, with up to 5 nm spectral resolution and 120x120 spatial resolution. We develop the necessary calibration methods based on halogen/fluorescent lamps and laser pointers to acquire all necessary information about the optical system. We also derive the mathematical methods to interpret and reconstruct spectra directly from the Bayer array images of a standard RGGB camera. This objective design introduces accurate spectral remote sensing to computational photography, with numerous applications in color theory, colorimetry, vision and rendering, making the acquisition of a spectral image as simple as taking a high-dynamic-range image.
Unsharp Masking, Countershading and Halos: Enhancements or Artifacts?
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2012) Trentacoste, Matthew; Mantiuk, Rafal; Heidrich, Wolfgang; Dufrot, Florian; P. Cignoni and T. Ertl
Countershading is a common technique for local image contrast manipulations, and is widely used both in automatic settings, such as image sharpening and tonemapping, as well as under artistic control, such as in paintings and interactive image processing software. Unfortunately, countershading is a double-edged sword: while correctly chosen parameters for a given viewing condition can significantly improve the image sharpness or trick the human visual system into perceiving a higher contrast than physically present in an image, wrong parameters, or different viewing conditions can result in objectionable halo artifacts. In this paper we investigate the perception of countershading in the context of a novel mask-based contrast enhancement algorithm and analyze the circumstances under which the resulting profiles turn from image enhancement to artifact for a range of parameters and viewing conditions. Our experimental results can be modeled as a function of the width of the countershading profile. We employ this empirical function in a range of applications such as image resizing, view dependent tone mapping, and countershading analysis in photographs and works of fine art.
Light-Field Retargeting
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2012) Birklbauer, Clemens; Bimber, Oliver; P. Cignoni and T. Ertl
We present a first approach to light-field retargeting using z-stack seam carving, which allows light-field compression and extension while retaining angular consistency. Our algorithm first converts an input light field into a set of perspective-sheared focal stacks. It then applies 3D deconvolution to convert the focal stacks into z-stacks, and seam-carves the z-stack of the center perspective. The computed seams of the center perspective are sheared and applied to the z-stacks of all off-center perspectives. Finally, the carved z-stacks are converted back into the perspective images of the output light field. To our knowledge, this is the first approach to light-field retargeting. Unlike existing stereo-pair retargeting or 3D retargeting techniques, it does not require depth information.
Super-Clothoids
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2012) Bertails-Descoubes, Florence; P. Cignoni and T. Ertl
Piecewise clothoids are 2D curves with continuous, piecewise linear curvature. Due to their smoothness properties, they have been extensively used in road design and robot path planning, as well as for the compact representation of hand-drawn curves. In this paper we present the Super-Clothoid model, a new mechanical model that for the first time allows for the computing of the dynamics of an elastic, inextensible piecewise clothoid. We first show that the kinematics of this model can be computed analytically depending on the Fresnel integrals, and precisely evaluated when required. Secondly, the discrete dynamics, naturally emerging from the Lagrange equations of motion, can be robustly and efficiently computed by performing and storing formal computations as far as possible, recoursing to numerical evaluation only when assembling the linear system to be solved at each time step. As a result, simulations turn out to be both interactive and stable, even for large displacements of the rod. Finally, we demonstrate the versatility of our model by handling various boundary conditions for the rod as well as complex external constraints such as frictional contact, and show that our model is perfectly adapted to inverse statics. Compared to lower-order models, the super-clothoid appears as a more natural and aesthetic primitive for bridging the gap between 2D geometric design and physics-based deformation.
Preface and Table of Contents
(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2012) P. Cignoni and T. Ertl
Selective Inspection and Interactive Visualization of Light Transport in Virtual Scenes
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2012) Reiner, Tim; Kaplanyan, Anton; Reinhard, Marcel; Dachsbacher, Carsten; P. Cignoni and T. Ertl
This paper presents novel interactive visualization techniques for inspecting the global light transport in virtual scenes. First, we propose a simple extension to photon mapping to gather required lighting information. We then introduce a set of five light inspection tools which process this data to provide further insights. Corresponding visualizations help the user to comprehend how light travels within a scene, how the lighting affects the appearance of a surface, and how objects cause lighting effects such as caustics. We implemented all tools for direct usage in real production environments. Rendering is based on progressive photon mapping, providing interactivity and immediate visual feedback. We conducted a user study to evaluate all techniques in various application scenarios and hence discuss their individual strengths and weaknesses. Moreover, we present feedback from domain experts.
Manufacturing Layered Attenuators for Multiple Prescribed Shadow Images
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2012) Baran, Ilya; Keller, Philipp; Bradley, Derek; Coros, Stelian; Jarosz, Wojciech; Nowrouzezahrai, Derek; Gross, Markus; P. Cignoni and T. Ertl
We present a practical and inexpensive method for creating physical objects that cast different color shadow images when illuminated by prescribed lighting configurations. The input to our system is a number of lighting configurations and corresponding desired shadow images. Our approach computes attenuation masks, which are then printed on transparent materials and stacked to form a single multi-layer attenuator. When illuminated with the input lighting configurations, this multi-layer attenuator casts the prescribed color shadow images. Alternatively, our method can compute layers so that their permutations produce different prescribed shadow images under fixed lighting. Each multi-layer attenuator is quick and inexpensive to produce, can generate multiple full-color shadows, and can be designed to respond to different types of natural or synthetic lighting setups. We illustrate the effectiveness of our multi-layer attenuators in simulation and in reality, with the sun as a light source.
Linear Analysis of Nonlinear Constraints for Interactive Geometric Modeling
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2012) Habbecke, Martin; Kobbelt, Leif; P. Cignoni and T. Ertl
Thanks to its flexibility and power to handle even complex geometric relations, 3D geometric modeling with nonlinear constraints is an attractive extension of traditional shape editing approaches. However, existing approaches to analyze and solve constraint systems usually fail to meet the two main challenges of an interactive 3D modeling system: For each atomic editing operation, it is crucial to adjust as few auxiliary vertices as possible in order to not destroy the user's earlier editing effort. Furthermore, the whole constraint resolution pipeline is required to run in real-time to enable a fluent, interactive workflow. To address both issues, we propose a novel constraint analysis and solution scheme based on a key observation: While the computation of actual vertex positions requires nonlinear techniques, under few simplifying assumptions the determination of the minimal set of to-be-updated vertices can be performed on a linearization of the constraint functions. Posing the constraint analysis phase as the solution of an under-determined linear system with as few non-zero elements as possible enables us to exploit an efficient strategy for the Cardinality Minimization problem known from the field of Compressed Sensing, resulting in an algorithm capable of handling hundreds of vertices and constraints in real-time. We demonstrate at the example of an image-based modeling system for architectural models that this approach performs very well in practical applications.

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