EG 1995 Conference Proceedings

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https://diglib.eg.org/handle/10.2312/13894

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An Adaptive Spatial Subdivision of the Object Space for Fast Collision Detection of Animated Rigid Bodies
(Blackwell Science Ltd and the Eurographics Association, 1995) Bandi, Srikanth; Thalmann, Daniel
Collision detection tests between objects dominate run time simulation of rigid body animation. Traditionally, hierarchical bounding box tests are used to minimize collision detection time. But the bounding boxes do not take shapes of the objects into account which results in a large number of collision detection tests. We propose an adaptive spatial subdivision of the object space based on octree structure to rectify this problem. We also present a technique for efficiently updating this structure periodically during the simulation.
Algorithms for Extracting Correct Critical Points and Constructing Topological Graphs from Discrete Geographical Elevation Data
(Blackwell Science Ltd and the Eurographics Association, 1995) Takahashi, Shigeo; Ikeda, Tetsuya; Shinagawa, Yoshihisa; Kunii, Tosiyasu L.; Ueda, Minoru
Researchers in the fields of computer graphics and geographical information systems (GISs) have extensively studied the methods of extracting terrain features such as peaks, pits, passes, ridges, and ravines from discrete elevation data. The existing techniques, however, do not guarantee the topological integrity of the extracted features because of their heuristic operations, which results in spurious features. Furthermore, there have been no algorithms for constructing topological graphs such as the surface network and the Reeb graph from the extracted peaks, pits, and passes. This paper presents new algorithms for extracting features and constructing the topological graphs using the features. Our algorithms enable us to extract correct terrain features; i.e., our method extracts the critical points that satisfy the Euler formula, which represents the topological invariant of smooth surfaces. This paper also provides an algorithm that converts the surface network to the Reeb graph for representing contour changes with respect to the height. The discrete elevation data used in this paper is a set of sample points on a terrain surface. Examples are presented to show that the algorithms also appeal to our visual cognition.
Automatic Reconstruction of Unstructured 3D Data: Combining a Medial Axis and Implicit Surfaces
(Blackwell Science Ltd and the Eurographics Association, 1995) Bittar, Eric; Tsingos, Nicolas; Gascuel, Marie-Paule
This paper presents a new method that combines a medial axis and implicit surfaces in order to reconstruct a 3D solid from an unstructured set of points scattered on the object s surface. The representation produced is based on iso-surfaces generated by skeletons, and is a particularly compact way of defining a smooth free-form solid. The method is based on the minimisation of an energy representing a"distance" between the set of data points and the iso-surface, resembling previous reserach19. Initialisation, however, is more robust and efficient since there is computation of the medial axis of the set of points. Instead of subdividing existing skeletons in order to refine the object s surface, a new reconstruction algorithm progressively selects skeleton-points from the pre- computed medial axis using an heuristic principle based on a"local energy" criterion. This drastically speeds up the reconstruction process. Moreover, using the medial axis allows reconstruction of objects with complex topology and geometry, like objects that have holes and branches or that are composed of several connected components. This process is fully automatic. The method has been successfully applied to both synthetic and real data.
A Direct Manipulation Interface for 3D Computer Animation
(Blackwell Science Ltd and the Eurographics Association, 1995) Snibbe, Scott Sona
We present a new set of interface techniques for visualizing and editing animation directly in a single three-dimensional scene. Motion is edited using direct-manipulation tools which satisfy high-level goals such as"reach this point at this time" or"go faster at this moment". These tools can be applied over an arbitrary temporal range and maintain arbitrary degrees of spatial and temporal continuity.We separate spatial and temporal control of position by using two curves for each animated object: the motion path which describes the 3D spatial path along which an object travels, and the motion graph, a function describing the distance traveled along this curve over time. Our direct-manipulation tools are implemented using displacement functions, a straightforward and scalable technique for satisfying motion constraints by composition of the displacement function with the motion graph or motion path. This paper will focus on applying displacement functions to positional change. However, the techniques presented are applicable to the animation of orientation, color, or any other attribute that varies over time.
Discrete Ray-Tracing of Huge Voxel Spaces
(Blackwell Science Ltd and the Eurographics Association, 1995) Stolte, Nilo; Caubet, Rene
The quality of images produced by Discrete Ray-Tracing voxel spaces is highly dependent on 3d grid resolution. The huge amount of memory needed to store such grids often discards discrete Ray-Tracing as a practical visualization algorithm. The use of an octree can drastically change this when most of space is empty, as such is the case in most scenes.Although the memory problem can be bypassed using the octree, the performance problem still remains. A known fact is that the performance of discrete traversal is optimal for quite low resolutions. This problem can be easily solved by dividing the task in two steps, working in two low resolutions instead of just one high resolution, thus taking advantage of optimal times in both steps. This is possible thanks to the octree property of representing the same scene in several different resolutions. This article presents a two step Discrete Ray-Tracing method using an octree and shows, by comparing it with the single step version, that a substantial gain in performance is achieved.
Distributed Augmented Reality for Collaborative Design Applications
(Blackwell Science Ltd and the Eurographics Association, 1995) Ahlers, Klaus H.; Kramer, Andre; Breen, David E.; Chevalier, Pierre-Yves; Crampton, Chris; Rose, Eric; Tuceryan, Mihran; Whitaker, Ross T.; Greer, Douglas
This paper presents a system for constructing collaborative design applications based on distributed augmented reality. Augmented reality interfaces are a natural method for presenting computer-based design by merging graphics with a view of the real world. Distribution enables users at remote sites to collaborate on design tasks. The users interactively control their local view, try out design options, and communicate design proposals. They share virtual graphical objects that substitute for real objects which are not yet physically created or are not yet placed into the real design environment.We describe the underlying augmented reality system and in particular how it has been extended in order to support multi-user collaboration. The construction of distributed augmented reality applications is made easier by a separation of interface, interaction and distribution issues. An interior design application is used as an example to demonstrate the advantages of our approach.
Fair Surface Reconstruction Using Quadratic Functionals
(Blackwell Science Ltd and the Eurographics Association, 1995) Kolb, Andreas; Pottmann, Helmut; Seidel, Hans-Peter
An algorithm for surface reconstruction from a polyhedron with arbitrary topology consisting of triangular faces is presented. The first variant of the algorithm constructs a curve network consisting of cubic Bezier curves meeting with tangent plane continuity at the vertices. This curve network is extended to a smooth surface by replacing each of the networks facets with a split patch consisting of three triangular Bezier patches. The remaining degrees of freedom of the curve network and the split patches are determined by minimizing a quadratic functional. This optimization process works either for the curve network and the split patches separately or in one simultaneous step. The second variant of our algorithm is based on the construction of an optimized curve network with higher continuity. Examples demonstrate the quality of the different methods.
Fast Shadowing Algorithm for Linear Light Sources
(Blackwell Science Ltd and the Eurographics Association, 1995) Tanaka, Toshimitsu; Takahashi, Tokiichiro
This paper presents a fast shadowing algorithm for linear light sources that uses a ray-oriented buffer. Space segmentation by the buffer guarantees that if a point is included in a subspace, all light rays toward the point are also contained in the subspace. Each cell of the buffer stores a list of objects that lie within or intersect the subspace allocated to the cell. Therefore, candidate objects, those that may cast shadows onto a point, are determined by referring to the cell where the point is mapped. In addition, whether each candidate object actually casts shadows or not is tested with the bounding-volume of the shadow space to reduce the number of objects subjected to expensive light clipping. The bounding-volumes are also stored in the buffer. For efficiently generating the ray-oriented buffer, we present the cylindrical scan-conversion algorithm. The algorithm preconverts objects surfaces to trapezia to decrease the light clipping cost, then connects the trapezia to the buffer cells.Due to the above improvements, our algorithm achieves over 10 times faster shadow generation compared to the conventional methods. Experimental results confirm that our method can generate realistic images with soft shadows in a few minutes.
Fast Wavelet Based Volume Rendering by Accumulation of Transparent Texture Maps
(Blackwell Science Ltd and the Eurographics Association, 1995) Lippert, L.; Gross, M. H.
In the following paper, a new method for fast and accurate volume intensity and color integration is elaborated, which employs wavelet decompositions and texture mapping. At this point, it comprises and unifies the advantages of recently introduced Fourier domain volume rendering techniques and wavelet based volume rendering. Specifically, the method computes analytic solutions of the ray intensity integral through a single wavelet by slicing its Fourier transform and by backprojecting it into the spatial domain. The resulting slices can be considered as RGB textures where R, G and B account for the decomposed volume color function. Due to the similarity of the basis functions, the computation of the texture map has to be figured out only once for each 3D mother wavelet. Hence, the final volume rendering procedure turns out to be a superposition of self-similar, transparent and colored textures, which is supported by modern hardware accumulation buffers. Linear shading and attenuation can be introduced by modifications of the wavelet s Fourier transform.The main advantages of this method are the provision of accurate solutions and quantification of error bounds, the absence of any expensive prefiltering and the independence of the computational costs from the image resolution. Furthermore, any required discretization, such as the resolution of the basis textures is defined within the computational framework of the wavelet transform. The method is not restricted to a specific type of wavelet unless is provides an analytic Fourier description, such as any B-spline wavelets do.
Filtering, Clustering and Hierarchy Construction: a New Solution for Ray-Tracing Complex Scenes
(Blackwell Science Ltd and the Eurographics Association, 1995) Cazals, Frederic; Drettakis, George; Puech, Claude
Data structures that handle very complex scenes (hundreds of thousands of objects) have in the past either been laboriously built by hand, or have required the determination of unintuitive parameter values by the user. It is often the case that an incorrect choice of these parameters can result in greedy memory requirements or severely degraded performance. As a remedy to this problem we propose a new data structure which is fully automatic since it does not require the user to determine any input parameters. The structure is built by first filtering the input objects by size, subsequently applying a clustering step to objects of the same size and finally building a hierarchy of uniform grids . We then show that this data structure can be efficiently constructed. The implementation of the shows that the new structure is stable since it s memory requirements grow linearly with the size of the scene, and that it presents a satisfactory compromise between memory usage and computational efficiency. A detailed comparison with previous data structures is also presented in the results.
Generating a Texture Map from Object-Surface Texture Data
(Blackwell Science Ltd and the Eurographics Association, 1995) Maruya, Makoto
A number of 3D digitizing methods, including stereopsis, are capable of measuring not only an object s shape but also its surface texture. Measured shape data can be expressed as a polyhedron whose faces are triangular, and object-surface texture data can be represented in the form of color data for each of the vertices of the various triangles. The ability to apply object-surface texture data directly to the creation of computer graphics images has been severely limited by the extreme difficulty of expressing such texture data in the image from which conventional texture mapping proceeds (commonly referred to as a texture map). Proposed here is a method that generates a texture map from object-surface texture data. First, the method reduces the number of triangles in the polyhedron while preserving essentially all the color data that it originally contained. Next, it arranges the triangles in the simplified triangle mesh onto a plane, and generates a texture map from this arrangement. This method preserves the full texture of an object, no matter how complex its shape, an advantage over the conventional cylindrical texture representation approach. Furthermore, since essentially all color data has been retained, the reduction in the number of triangles does not produce any significant reduction in the texture-realism of the object image produced.
A Graph-Based Approach to Surface Reconstruction
(Blackwell Science Ltd and the Eurographics Association, 1995) Mencl, Robert
A new approach to the reconstruction of a surface from an unorganized set of points in space is presented. The point set may for example be obtained with a laser scanner or a manual digitizing tool, and is the only source of information about the shape of the acquired object. The basic idea is to calculate the Euclidean minimum spanning tree (EMST) of the given points. The EMST is then augmented to the so-called surface description graph (SDG). Finally the wire frame defined by the SDG are filled with triangles. The advantage of our approach is that also highly non-convex and even disconnected surfaces are reconstructed quite reliably. This is demonstrated for a variety of data sets.
The HUMANOID Environment for Interactive Animation of Multiple Deformable Human Characters
(Blackwell Science Ltd and the Eurographics Association, 1995) Boulic, R.; Capin, T.; Huang, Z.; Kalra, P.; Lintermann, B.; Magnenat-Thalmann, N.; Moccozet, L. and Molet, T. and Pandzic, I. and Saar, K. and Schmitt, A. and Shen, J. and Thalmann, D.
We describe the HUMANOID environment dedicated to human modeling and animation for general multimedia, VR, and CAD applications integrating virtual humans. We present the design of the system and the integration of the various features: generic modeling of a large class of entities with the BODY data structure, realistic skin deformation for body and hands, facial animation, collision detection, integrated motion control and parallelization of computation intensive tasks.
An Incremental Alignment Algorithm for Parallel Volume Rendering
(Blackwell Science Ltd and the Eurographics Association, 1995) Or, Daniel Cohen; Fleishman, Shachar
This paper introduces a data distribution scheme and an alignment algorithm for parallel volume rendering. The algorithm performs a single wrap-around shear transformation which requires only a regular inter-processor communication pattern. The alignment can be implemented incrementally consisting of short distance shifts, thus significantly reducing the communication overhead. The alignment process is a non-destructive transformation, consisting of a single non-scaling shear operation. This is a unique feature which provides the basis for the incremental algorithm.
The MADE Help System
(Blackwell Science Ltd and the Eurographics Association, 1995) Haindl, Michal; de Ruiter, Behr
MADE is the acronym for the ESPRIT project 6307, whose aim is to develop an object oriented multimedia application development environment. As part of this project the MADE help system is designed to be a distributed hypermedia system with additional support for run-time object monitoring and contextual help.
Modeling 3D Curves of Minimal Energy
(Blackwell Science Ltd and the Eurographics Association, 1995) Veltkamp, Remco C.; Wesselink, Wieger
Modeling a curve through minimizing its energy yields an overall smooth curve. A common way to model shape features is to perform the minimization subject to a number of interpolation constraints. This way of modeling is attractive because the designer is not bothered with the precise representation of the curve (e.g. control points). However, local shape specification by means of interpolation constraints is very limited. On the other hand, local deformation by repositioning control points is powerful but very laborious, and destroys the minimal energy property. In this paper, deform operators are introduced for 3D curve modeling that have built-in energy terms that have an intuitive effect. These operators allow local shape modification and do justice to the energy minimization way of modeling.
Morphological Operations for Color-Coded Images
(Blackwell Science Ltd and the Eurographics Association, 1995) Busch, Christoph and Eberle, Michael
The subject of this paper is the semantically based postprocessing of color-coded images such as classification results. We outline why the classical definition of mathematical morphology suffers if it is used for processing of coded image data. Therefore we provide an extension for morphological operations such as dilation, erosion, opening, and closing. With a new understanding of morphology we introduce bridging and tunneling as further combinations of dilation and erosion. The extensions are applied to medical image data, where the semantic rules stem from basic anatomical knowledge.
A Multimedia Constraint System1
(Blackwell Science Ltd and the Eurographics Association, 1995) van Hintum, J.E.A.; Reynolds, G.J.
The MADE constraint system provides excellent opportunities to introduce constraints in a multimedia application. Multimedia applications are not only a good place to experiment with constraint systems- constraints in a multimedia environment are almost indispensable. Due to the overwhelming amount of data and the number of relations between several parts of this data, multimedia applications almost demand the support of a constraint management system.The MADE constraint system combines the object oriented programming paradigm, inherited from the mC++ language, the declarative constraint programming paradigm and the special requirements imposed upon the constraint system by the multimedia environment. Among other things, the MADE constraint system provides parallel satisfaction techniques- several constraints may be solved simultaneously and this satisfaction process is performed in parallel with the application. This not only reduces the time needed to solve the constraints, it also allows the multimedia application to proceed with its presentation while (beneath the surface) the constraints are maintained. This not only holds for the parts of the presentation that are not constrained at all, but also for those parts that are. Furthermore, the constraint system is transparent to the multimedia application- no special coding or preparation of the objects in the application is necessary. Constraints can be added later to the application without much work. Besides that, it is also possible to add and remove constraints at runtime- objects may be constrained for only a period of the time the application is running.
Multiresolution B-spline Radiosity
(Blackwell Science Ltd and the Eurographics Association, 1995) Yu, Yizhou; Peng, Qunsheng
This paper introduces a kind of new wavelet radiosity method called multiresolution B-spline radiosity, which uses B-splines of different scales to represent radiosity distribution functions. A set of techniques and algorithms, such as function extrapolation, adaptive quadrature, scale adjustment and octree, are proposed to implement it. This method sets up hierarchical structures on surfaces, keeps radiosity distribution continuous at element boundaries, does not need postprocessing, and does not prevent the use of any surface whose parameter domain is rectilinear.
A new radiosity approach for regular objects: application to ruled surfaces
(Blackwell Science Ltd and the Eurographics Association, 1995) ARQUES, Didier; MICHELIN, Sylvain
This paper introduces a new approach in the radiosity method. The main principle applied here, is the improvement of form factor computation by the knowledge of the model properties. More precisely, if surfaces describing a scene are"regular", the values of the form factor and its"derivatives" between any patch B and a patch A intervening in the meshing of a given surface, enable us to evaluate (with a required precision) the form factors values between B and the neighboring patches of A. We will also show that the mathematical relation we have obtained, 1) is especially efficient with ruled surfaces, 2) significantly decreases the computation time, 3) is well-adapted to refinement or subdivision techniques and 4) gives us an interesting variety of surfaces. Calculation times are equivalent to those obtained with a projective method (hemi-cube for example) but with an efficient control of the generated errors.

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