41-Issue 1

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https://diglib.eg.org/handle/10.2312/2633157

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Immersive Analytics with Abstract 3D Visualizations: A Survey
(© 2022 Eurographics ‐ The European Association for Computer Graphics and John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2022) Kraus, Matthias; Fuchs, Johannes; Sommer, Björn; Klein, Karsten; Engelke, Ulrich; Keim, Daniel; Schreiber, Falk; Hauser, Helwig and Alliez, Pierre
After a long period of scepticism, more and more publications describe basic research but also practical approaches to how abstract data can be presented in immersive environments for effective and efficient data understanding. Central aspects of this important research question in immersive analytics research are concerned with the use of 3D for visualization, the embedding in the immersive space, the combination with spatial data, suitable interaction paradigms and the evaluation of use cases. We provide a characterization that facilitates the comparison and categorization of published works and present a survey of publications that gives an overview of the state of the art, current trends, and gaps and challenges in current research.
A Generative Framework for Image‐based Editing of Material Appearance using Perceptual Attributes
(© 2022 Eurographics ‐ The European Association for Computer Graphics and John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2022) Delanoy, J.; Lagunas, M.; Condor, J.; Gutierrez, D.; Masia, B.; Hauser, Helwig and Alliez, Pierre
Single‐image appearance editing is a challenging task, traditionally requiring the estimation of additional scene properties such as geometry or illumination. Moreover, the exact interaction of light, shape and material reflectance that elicits a given perceptual impression is still not well understood. We present an image‐based editing method that allows to modify the material appearance of an object by increasing or decreasing high‐level perceptual attributes, using a single image as input. Our framework relies on a two‐step generative network, where the first step drives the change in appearance and the second produces an image with high‐frequency details. For training, we augment an existing material appearance dataset with perceptual judgements of high‐level attributes, collected through crowd‐sourced experiments, and build upon training strategies that circumvent the cumbersome need for original‐edited image pairs. We demonstrate the editing capabilities of our framework on a variety of inputs, both synthetic and real, using two common perceptual attributes ( and ), and validate the perception of appearance in our edited images through a user study.
A Survey on Cross‐Virtuality Analytics
(© 2022 Eurographics ‐ The European Association for Computer Graphics and John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2022) Fröhler, B.; Anthes, C.; Pointecker, F.; Friedl, J.; Schwajda, D.; Riegler, A.; Tripathi, S.; Holzmann, C.; Brunner, M.; Jodlbauer, H.; Jetter, H.‐C.; Heinzl, C.; Hauser, Helwig and Alliez, Pierre
Cross‐virtuality analytics (XVA) is a novel field of research within immersive analytics and visual analytics. A broad range of heterogeneous devices across the reality–virtuality continuum, along with respective visual metaphors and analysis techniques, are currently becoming available. The goal of XVA is to enable visual analytics that use transitional and collaborative interfaces to seamlessly integrate different devices and support multiple users. In this work, we take a closer look at XVA and analyse the existing body of work for an overview of its current state. We classify the related literature regarding ways of establishing cross‐virtuality by interconnecting different stages in the reality–virtuality continuum, as well as techniques for transitioning and collaborating between the different stages. We provide insights into visualization and interaction techniques employed in current XVA systems. We report on ways of evaluating such systems, and analyse the domains where such systems are becoming available. Finally, we discuss open challenges in XVA, giving directions for future research.
Placing Arrows in Directed Graph Layouts: Algorithms and Experiments
(© 2022 Eurographics ‐ The European Association for Computer Graphics and John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2022) Binucci, Carla; Didimo, Walter; Kaufmann, Michael; Liotta, Giuseppe; Montecchiani, Fabrizio; Hauser, Helwig and Alliez, Pierre
We study how to place arrow heads in directed graph drawings aiming at minimizing their overlaps and avoiding intersections between arrow heads and edges. The objective is to support users to correctly and quickly recognize edge orientations, i.e. to deduce unambiguously the edge orientations. Our contribution is two‐fold: (i) We present exact and heuristic algorithms for this arrow placement problem, along with an extensive experimental analysis of these techniques; and (ii) we report on a user study aimed to understand the impact of different arrow placement strategies on performing global and local analysis tasks on directed graph layouts.
Economic Upper Bound Estimation in Hausdorff Distance Computation for Triangle Meshes
(© 2022 Eurographics ‐ The European Association for Computer Graphics and John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2022) Zheng, Yicun; Sun, Haoran; Liu, Xinguo; Bao, Hujun; Huang, Jin; Hauser, Helwig and Alliez, Pierre
The Hausdorff distance is one of the most fundamental metrics for comparing 3D shapes. To compute the Hausdorff distance efficiently from a triangular mesh to another triangular mesh , one needs to cull the unnecessary triangles on quickly. These triangles have no chance to improve the Hausdorff distance estimation, that is the parts with local upper bound smaller than the global lower bound. The local upper bound estimation should be tight, use fast distance computation, and involve a small number of triangles in during the reduction phase for efficiency. In this paper, we propose to use point‐triangle distance, and only involve at most four triangles in in the reduction phase. Comparing with the state‐of‐the‐art proposed by Tang et al. in 2009, which uses more costly triangle‐triangle distance and may involve a large number of triangles in reduction phase, our local upper bound estimation is faster, and with only a small impact on the tightness of the bound on error estimation. Such a more economic strategy boosts the overall performance significantly. Experiments on the Thingi10K dataset show that our method can achieve several (even over 20) times speedup on average. On a few models with different placements and resolutions, we show that close placement and large difference in resolution bring big challenges to Hausdorff distance computation, and explain why our method can achieve more significant speedup on challenging cases.
Shadow Layers for Participating Media
(© 2022 Eurographics ‐ The European Association for Computer Graphics and John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2022) Desrichard, François; Vanderhaeghe, David; Paulin, Mathias; Hauser, Helwig and Alliez, Pierre
In the movie industry pipeline, rendering programs output the main image along with a collection of Arbitrary Output Variable layers (AOVs) that retain specific information on light transport and scene properties in image space. Compositing artists use AOVs to improve the quality and appearance of the rendered picture during post‐processing, according to the artistic goal of the shot. In particular, cast shadows are manipulated to support narration and storytelling, as the human perception tolerates non‐physical edits. Conventional path tracing renderers often propose a shadow matte AOV containing radiance lost when shadow rays are occluded. Previous work has shown that they incorrectly estimate shadow and miss occluded radiance from indirect light sources, and that shadow layers must be used to correctly recover radiance from single, solid occluders. In this paper, we generalise shadow layers to an arbitrary number of occluders, and add support for participating media. We begin by quantifying the radiance loss between the radiative transfer equation and the rendering equation, and translate it into a path integral formulation for an efficient Monte Carlo integration. We propose a prototype implementation that renders the main image and shadow layers in a single pass with an affordable computational overhead.
EHR STAR: The State‐Of‐the‐Art in Interactive EHR Visualization
(© 2022 Eurographics ‐ The European Association for Computer Graphics and John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2022) Wang, Q.; Laramee, R.S.; Hauser, Helwig and Alliez, Pierre
Since the inception of electronic health records (EHR) and population health records (PopHR), the volume of archived digital health records is growing rapidly. Large volumes of heterogeneous health records require advanced visualization and visual analytics systems to uncover valuable insight buried in complex databases. As a vibrant sub‐field of information visualization and visual analytics, many interactive EHR and PopHR visualization (EHR Vis) systems have been proposed, developed, and evaluated by clinicians to support effective clinical analysis and decision making. We present the state‐of‐the‐art (STAR) of EHR Vis literature and open access healthcare data sources and provide an up‐to‐date overview on this important topic. We identify trends and challenges in the field, introduce novel literature and data classifications, and incorporate a popular medical terminology standard called the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS). We provide a curated list of electronic and population healthcare data sources and open access datasets as a resource for potential researchers, in order to address one of the main challenges in this field. We classify the literature based on multidisciplinary research themes stemming from reoccurring topics. The survey provides a valuable overview of EHR Vis revealing both mature areas and potential future multidisciplinary research directions.
Visual Analysis of Two‐Phase Flow Displacement Processes in Porous Media
(© 2022 Eurographics ‐ The European Association for Computer Graphics and John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2022) Frey, Steffen; Scheller, Stefan; Karadimitriou, Nikolaos; Lee, Dongwon; Reina, Guido; Steeb, Holger; Ertl, Thomas; Hauser, Helwig and Alliez, Pierre
We developed a new visualization approach to gain a better understanding of the displacement of one fluid phase by another in porous media. This is based on a recent experimental parameter study with varying capillary numbers and viscosity ratios. We analyse the temporal evolution of characteristic values in this two‐phase flow scenario and discuss how to directly compare experiments across different temporal scales. To enable spatio‐temporal analysis, we introduce a new abstract visual representation showing which paths through the porous medium were occupied and for how long. These transport networks allow to assess the impact of different acting forces and they are designed to yield expressive comparability and linking to the experimental parameter space both supported by additional visual cues. This joint work of porous media experts and visualization researchers yields new insights regarding two‐phase flow on the microscale, and our visualization approach contributes towards the overarching goal of the domain scientists to characterize porous media flow based on capillary numbers and viscosity ratios.
Dynamic Diffuse Global Illumination Resampling
(© 2022 Eurographics ‐ The European Association for Computer Graphics and John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2022) Majercik, Zander; Müller, Thomas; Keller, Alexander; Nowrouzezahrai, Derek; McGuire, Morgan; Hauser, Helwig and Alliez, Pierre
Interactive global illumination remains a challenge in radiometrically and geometrically complex scenes. Specialized sampling strategies are effective for specular and near‐specular transport because the scattering has relatively low directional variance per scattering event. In contrast, the high variance from transport paths comprising multiple rough glossy or diffuse scattering events remains notoriously difficult to resolve with a small number of samples. We extend unidirectional path tracing to address this by combining screen‐space reservoir resampling and sparse world‐space probes, significantly improving sample efficiency for transport contributions that terminate on diffuse scattering events. Our experiments demonstrate a clear improvement—at equal time and equal quality—over purely path traced and purely probe‐based baselines. Moreover, when combined with commodity denoisers, we are able to interactively render global illumination in complex scenes.
A Survey of Tasks and Visualizations in Multiverse Analysis Reports
(© 2022 Eurographics ‐ The European Association for Computer Graphics and John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2022) Hall, Brian D.; Liu, Yang; Jansen, Yvonne; Dragicevic, Pierre; Chevalier, Fanny; Kay, Matthew; Hauser, Helwig and Alliez, Pierre
Analysing data from experiments is a complex, multi‐step process, often with multiple defensible choices available at each step. While analysts often report a single analysis without documenting how it was chosen, this can cause serious transparency and methodological issues. To make the sensitivity of analysis results to analytical choices transparent, some statisticians and methodologists advocate the use of ‘multiverse analysis’: reporting the full range of outcomes that result from all combinations of defensible analytic choices. Summarizing this combinatorial explosion of statistical results presents unique challenges; several approaches to visualizing the output of multiverse analyses have been proposed across a variety of fields (e.g. psychology, statistics, economics, neuroscience). In this article, we (1) introduce a consistent conceptual framework and terminology for multiverse analyses that can be applied across fields; (2) identify the tasks researchers try to accomplish when visualizing multiverse analyses and (3) classify multiverse visualizations into ‘archetypes’, assessing how well each archetype supports each task. Our work sets a foundation for subsequent research on developing visualization tools and techniques to support multiverse analysis and its reporting.
Comparison of Modern Omnidirectional Precise Shadowing Techniques Versus Ray Tracing
(© 2022 Eurographics ‐ The European Association for Computer Graphics and John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2022) Kobrtek, Jozef; Milet, Tomas; Tóth, Michal; Herout, Adam; Hauser, Helwig and Alliez, Pierre
This paper presents an in depth comparison of state‐of‐the‐art precise shadowing techniques for an omnidirectional point light. We chose several types of modern shadowing algorithms, starting from stencil shadow volumes, methods using traversal of acceleration structures to hardware‐accelerated ray‐traced shadows. Some methods were further improved – robustness, increased performance; we also provide the first multi‐platform implementations of some of the tested algorithms. All the methods are evaluated on several test scenes in different resolutions and on two hardware platforms – with and without dedicated hardware units for ray tracing. We conclude our findings based on speed and memory consumption. Ray‐tracing is the fastest and one of the easiest methods to implement with small memory footprint. The Omnidirectional Frustum‐Traced Shadows method has a predictable memory footprint and is the second fastest algorithm tested. Our stencil shadow volumes are faster than some newer algorithms. Per‐Triangle Shadow Volumes and Clustered Per‐Triangle Shadow Volumes are difficult to implement and require the most memory; the latter method scales well with the scene complexity and resolution. Deep Partitioned Shadow Volumes does not excel in any of the measured parameters and is suitable for smaller scenes. The source codes of the testing framework have been made publicly available.
Evaluating Data‐type Heterogeneity in Interactive Visual Analyses with Parallel Axes
(© 2022 Eurographics ‐ The European Association for Computer Graphics and John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2022) Matute, José; Linsen, Lars; Hauser, Helwig and Alliez, Pierre
The application of parallel axes for the interactive visual analysis of multidimensional data is a widely used concept. While multidimensional data sets are commonly heterogeneous in nature, i.e. data items contain both numerical and categorical (including ordinal) attribute values, the use of parallel axes often assumes either numerical or categorical attributes. While Parallel Coordinates and their large variety of extensions focus on numerical data, Parallel Sets and related methods focus on categorical attributes. While both concepts allow for displaying heterogeneous data, no clear strategies have been defined for representing categories in Parallel Coordinates or discretization of continuous ranges in Parallel Sets. In practice, type conversion as a pre‐processing step can be used as well as coordinated views of numerical and categorical data visualizations. We evaluate traditional and state‐of‐the‐art approaches with respect to the interplay of categorical and numerical dimensions for querying probability‐based events. We also compare against a heterogeneous Parallel Coordinates/Parallel Set approach with a novel interface between categorical and numerical axes . We show that approaches for mapping categorical data to numerical axis representations can lead to lower accuracy in answering probability‐based questions and higher response times than hybrid approaches in multiple‐event scenarios.
Stroke‐Based Drawing and Inbetweening with Boundary Strokes
(© 2022 Eurographics ‐ The European Association for Computer Graphics and John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2022) Jiang, Jie; Seah, Hock Soon; Liew, Hong Ze; Hauser, Helwig and Alliez, Pierre
In conventional 2D drawing systems, a drawing usually consists of multiple layers and is composited by rendering layers from back to front. A shape in a higher layer occludes contents in lower layers. However, shapes must have boundaries that form closed regions for occlusion. This limitation causes problems in occlusion resolution. We therefore propose a method to allow users to specify and resolve occlusion in stroke‐based drawing with boundary strokes. Rather than defining shapes, we introduce boundary strokes, which are strokes with occluding sides that work as occluding surfaces. We further introduce a series of user interactions, such as grouping, linking and inverting, on the boundary strokes to realize different occlusion effects. Geometry is then used to find the regions of occluding surfaces to resolve occlusion. The drawings are ready to be coloured, if needed. We extend our method to resolve occlusion in 2D stroke‐based inbetweening. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by applying it to resolve occlusion in single drawings and 2D stroke‐based inbetweening.
Design and Evaluation Study of Visual Analytics Decision Support Tools in Air Traffic Control
(© 2022 Eurographics ‐ The European Association for Computer Graphics and John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2022) Zohrevandi, E.; Westin, C. A. L.; Lundberg, J.; Ynnerman, A.; Hauser, Helwig and Alliez, Pierre
Operators in air traffic control facing time‐ and safety‐critical situations call for efficient, reliable and robust real‐time processing and interpretation of complex data. Automation support tools aid controllers in these processes to prevent separation losses between aircraft. Issues of current support tools include limited ‘what‐if’ and ‘what‐else’ probe functionalities in relation to vertical solutions. This work presents the design and evaluation of two visual analytics interfaces that promote contextual awareness and support ‘what‐if’ and ‘what‐else’ probes in the spatio‐temporal domain aiming to improve information integration and support controllers in prioritising conflict resolution. Both interfaces visualize vertical solution spaces against a time‐altitude graph. The main contributions of this paper are: (a) the presentation of two interfaces for supporting conflict solving; (b) the novel representation of how vertical information and aircraft rate of climb and descent affect conflicts and (c) an evaluation and comparison of the interfaces with a traditional air traffic control support system. The evaluation study was performed with domain experts to compare the effects of visualization concepts on operator engagement in processing solutions suggested by the tools. Results show that the visualizations support operators' ability to understand and resolve conflicts. Based on the results, general design guidelines for time‐critical domains are proposed.
Augmenting Digital Sheet Music through Visual Analytics
(© 2022 Eurographics ‐ The European Association for Computer Graphics and John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2022) Miller, Matthias; Fürst, Daniel; Hauptmann, Hanna; Keim, Daniel A.; El‐Assady, Mennatallah; Hauser, Helwig and Alliez, Pierre
Music analysis tasks, such as structure identification and modulation detection, are tedious when performed manually due to the complexity of the common music notation (CMN). Fully automated analysis instead misses human intuition about relevance. Existing approaches use abstract data‐driven visualizations to assist music analysis but lack a suitable connection to the CMN. Therefore, music analysts often prefer to remain in their familiar context. Our approach enhances the traditional analysis workflow by complementing CMN with interactive visualization entities as minimally intrusive augmentations. Gradual step‐wise transitions empower analysts to retrace and comprehend the relationship between the CMN and abstract data representations. We leverage glyph‐based visualizations for harmony, rhythm and melody to demonstrate our technique's applicability. Design‐driven visual query filters enable analysts to investigate statistical and semantic patterns on various abstraction levels. We conducted pair analytics sessions with 16 participants of different proficiency levels to gather qualitative feedback about the intuitiveness, traceability and understandability of our approach. The results show that MusicVis supports music analysts in getting new insights about feature characteristics while increasing their engagement and willingness to explore.
Complex Functional Maps: A Conformal Link Between Tangent Bundles
(© 2022 Eurographics ‐ The European Association for Computer Graphics and John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2022) Donati, Nicolas; Corman, Etienne; Melzi, Simone; Ovsjanikov, Maks; Hauser, Helwig and Alliez, Pierre
In this paper, we introduce complex functional maps, which extend the functional map framework to conformal maps between tangent vector fields on surfaces. A key property of these maps is their . More specifically, we demonstrate that unlike regular functional maps that link of two manifolds, our complex functional maps establish a link between , thus permitting robust and efficient transfer of tangent vector fields. By first endowing and then exploiting the tangent bundle of each shape with a complex structure, the resulting operations become naturally orientation‐aware, thus favouring across shapes, without relying on descriptors or extra regularization. Finally, and perhaps more importantly, we demonstrate how these objects enable several practical applications within the functional map framework. We show that functional maps and their complex counterparts can be estimated jointly to promote orientation preservation, regularizing pipelines that previously suffered from orientation‐reversing symmetry errors.
Feature‐Adaptive and Hierarchical Subdivision Gradient Meshes
(© 2022 Eurographics ‐ The European Association for Computer Graphics and John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2022) Zhou, J.; Hettinga, G.J.; Houwink, S.; Kosinka, J.; Hauser, Helwig and Alliez, Pierre
Gradient meshes, an advanced vector graphics primitive, are widely used by designers for creating scalable vector graphics. Traditional variants require a regular rectangular topology, which is a severe design restriction. The more advanced subdivision gradient mesh allows for an arbitrary manifold topology and is based on subdivision techniques to define the resulting colour surface. This also allows the artists to manipulate the geometry and colours at various levels of subdivision. Recent advances allow for the interpolation of both geometry and colour, local detail following edits at coarser subdivision levels and sharp colour transitions. A shortcoming of all existing methods is their dependence on global refinement, which makes them unsuitable for real‐time (commercial) design applications. We present a novel method that incorporates the idea of feature‐adaptive subdivision and uses approximating patches suitable for hardware tessellation with real‐time performance. Further novel features include multiple interaction mechanisms and self‐intersection prevention during interactive design/editing.
GlassNet: Label Decoupling‐based Three‐stream Neural Network for Robust Image Glass Detection
(© 2022 Eurographics ‐ The European Association for Computer Graphics and John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2022) Zheng, Chengyu; Shi, Ding; Yan, Xuefeng; Liang, Dong; Wei, Mingqiang; Yang, Xin; Guo, Yanwen; Xie, Haoran; Hauser, Helwig and Alliez, Pierre
Most of the existing object detection methods generate poor glass detection results, due to the fact that the transparent glass shares the same appearance with arbitrary objects behind it in an image. Different from traditional deep learning‐based wisdoms that simply use the object boundary as an auxiliary supervision, we exploit label decoupling to decompose the original labelled ground‐truth (GT) map into an interior‐diffusion map and a boundary‐diffusion map. The GT map in collaboration with the two newly generated maps breaks the imbalanced distribution of the object boundary, leading to improved glass detection quality. We have three key contributions to solve the transparent glass detection problem: (1) We propose a three‐stream neural network (call GlassNet for short) to fully absorb beneficial features in the three maps. (2) We design a multi‐scale interactive dilation module to explore a wider range of contextual information. (3) We develop an attention‐based boundary‐aware feature Mosaic module to integrate multi‐modal information. Extensive experiments on the benchmark dataset exhibit clear improvements of our method over SOTAs, in terms of both the overall glass detection accuracy and boundary clearness.
Path Guiding Using Spatio‐Directional Mixture Models
(© 2022 Eurographics ‐ The European Association for Computer Graphics and John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2022) Dodik, Ana; Papas, Marios; Öztireli, Cengiz; Müller, Thomas; Hauser, Helwig and Alliez, Pierre
We propose a learning‐based method for light‐path construction in path tracing algorithms, which iteratively optimizes and samples from what we refer to as spatio‐directional Gaussian mixture models (SDMMs). In particular, we approximate incident radiance as an online‐trained 5D mixture that is accelerated by a D‐tree. Using the same framework, we approximate BSDFs as pre‐trained D mixtures, where is the number of BSDF parameters. Such an approach addresses two major challenges in path‐guiding models. First, the 5D radiance representation naturally captures correlation between the spatial and directional dimensions. Such correlations are present in, for example parallax and caustics. Second, by using a tangent‐space parameterization of Gaussians, our spatio‐directional mixtures can perform approximate product sampling with arbitrarily oriented BSDFs. Existing models are only able to do this by either foregoing anisotropy of the mixture components or by representing the radiance field in local (normal aligned) coordinates, which both make the radiance field more difficult to learn. An additional benefit of the tangent‐space parameterization is that each individual Gaussian is mapped to the solid sphere with low distortion near its centre of mass. Our method performs especially well on scenes with small, localized luminaires that induce high spatio‐directional correlation in the incident radiance.
Real‐Time Microstructure Rendering with MIP‐Mapped Normal Map Samples
(© 2022 Eurographics ‐ The European Association for Computer Graphics and John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2022) Tan, Haowen; Zhu, Junqiu; Xu, Yanning; Meng, Xiangxu; Wang, Lu; Yan, Ling‐Qi; Hauser, Helwig and Alliez, Pierre
Normal map‐based microstructure rendering can generate both glint and scratch appearance accurately. However, the extra high‐resolution normal map that defines every microfacet normal may incur high storage and computation costs. We present an example‐based real‐time rendering method for arbitrary microstructure materials, which significantly reduces the required storage space. Our method takes a small‐size normal map sample as input. We implicitly synthesize a high‐resolution normal map from the normal map sample and construct MIP‐mapped 4D position‐normal Gaussian lobes. Based on the above MIP‐mapped 4D lobes and a LUT (lookup table) data structure for the synthesized high‐resolution normal map, an efficient Gaussian query method is presented to evaluate ‐NDFs (position‐normal distribution functions) for shading. We can render complex scenes with glint and scratch surfaces in real time (30 fps) with a full high‐definition resolution, and the space required for each microstructure material is decreased to 30 MB.

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