Georgios Miaoulis - Böcker

The purpose of this volume is to present current work of the Intelligent Computer Graphics community, a community growing up year after year. Indeed, if at the beg- ning of Computer Graphics the use of Artificial Intelligence techniques was quite unknown, more and more researchers all over the world are nowadays interested in intelligent techniques allowing substantial improvements of traditional Computer Graphics methods. The other main contribution of intelligent techniques in Computer Graphics is to allow invention of completely new methods, often based on automation of a lot of tasks assumed in the past by the user in an imprecise and (human) time consuming manner. The history of research in Computer Graphics is very edifying. At the beginning, due to the slowness of computers in the years 1960, the unique research concern was visualisation. The purpose of Computer Graphics researchers was to find new visua- sation algorithms, less and less time consuming, in order to reduce the enormous time required for visualisation. A lot of interesting algorithms were invented during these first years of research in Computer Graphics. The scenes to be displayed were very simple because the computing power of computers was very low. So, scene modelling was not necessary and scenes were designed directly by the user, who had to give co-ordinates of vertices of scene polygons.

Scene modeling is a very important part in Computer Graphics because it allows c- ating more or less complex models to be rendered, coming from the real world or from the designer’s imagination.

In this book, three main notions will be used in the editors search of improvements in various areas of computer graphics: Artificial Intelligence, Viewpoint Complexity and Human Intelligence. Several Artificial Intelligence techniques are used in presented intelligent scene modelers, mainly declarative ones. Among them, the mostly used techniques are Expert systems, Constraint Satisfaction Problem resolution and Machine-learning. The notion of viewpoint complexity, that is complexity of a scene seen from a given viewpoint, will be used in improvement proposals for a lot of computer graphics problems like scene understanding, virtual world exploration, image-based modeling and rendering, ray tracing and radiosity. Very often, viewpoint complexity is used in conjunction with Artificial Intelligence techniques like Heuristic search and Problem resolution. The notions of artificial Intelligence and Viewpoint Complexity may help to automatically resolve a big number of computer graphics problems. However, there are special situations where is required to find a particular solution for each situation. In such a case, human intelligence has to replace, or to be combined with, artificial intelligence. Such cases, and proposed solutions are also presented in this book.

However, even if in most cases the used intelligent techniques are due to Artificial - telligence, sometimes, simple human intelligence can find interesting solutions in cases where traditional Computer Graphics techniques, even combined with Artificial Intelligence ones, cannot propose any satisfactory solution.

The purpose of this volume is to present current work of the Intelligent Computer Graphics community, a community growing up year after year. Indeed, if at the beg- ning of Computer Graphics the use of Artificial Intelligence techniques was quite unknown, more and more researchers all over the world are nowadays interested in intelligent techniques allowing substantial improvements of traditional Computer Graphics methods. The other main contribution of intelligent techniques in Computer Graphics is to allow invention of completely new methods, often based on automation of a lot of tasks assumed in the past by the user in an imprecise and (human) time consuming manner. The history of research in Computer Graphics is very edifying. At the beginning, due to the slowness of computers in the years 1960, the unique research concern was visualisation. The purpose of Computer Graphics researchers was to find new visua- sation algorithms, less and less time consuming, in order to reduce the enormous time required for visualisation. A lot of interesting algorithms were invented during these first years of research in Computer Graphics. The scenes to be displayed were very simple because the computing power of computers was very low. So, scene modelling was not necessary and scenes were designed directly by the user, who had to give co-ordinates of vertices of scene polygons.

Scene modeling is a very important part in Computer Graphics because it allows c- ating more or less complex models to be rendered, coming from the real world or from the designer’s imagination. However, scene modeling is a very difficult task, as there is a need of more and more complex scenes and traditional geometric modelers are not well adapted to computer aided design. Even if traditional scene modelers offer very interesting tools to facilitate the designer’s work, they suffer from a very important drawback, the lack of flexibility, which does not authorize the designer to use incomplete or imprecise descriptions, in order to express his (her) mental image of the scene to be designed. Thus, with most of the current geometric modelers the user must have a quite precise idea of the scene to design before using the modeler to achieve the modeling task. This kind of design is not really a computer aided one, because the main creative ideas have been elaborated without any help of the modeler. Declarative scene modeling could be an interesting alternative to traditional g- metric modeling. Indeed, declarative scene modeling tries to give intuitive solutions to the scene modeling problem by using Artificial Intelligence techniques which allow the user to describe high level properties of a scene and the modeler to give all the solutions corresponding to imprecise properties.

Nowadays, intelligent techniques are more and more used in Computer Graphics in order to optimise the processing time, to find more accurate solutions for a lot of Computer Graphics problems, than with traditional methods, or simply to find solutions in problems where traditional methods fail. The purpose of this volume is to present current work of the Intelligent Computer Graphics community, a community growing up year after year. This volume is a kind of continuation of the previously published Springer volumes “Artificial Intelligence Techniques for Computer Graphics” (2008) and “Intelligent Computer Graphics 2009” (2009).This volume contains selected extended papers from the last 3IA Conference (3IA’2010), which has been held in Athens (Greece) in May 2010. This year papers are particularly exciting and concern areas like rendering, viewpoint quality, data visualisation, vision, computational aesthetics, scene understanding, intelligent lighting, declarative modelling, GIS, scene reconstruction and other important themes.

In Computer Graphics, the use of intelligent techniques started more recently than in other research areas. However, during these last two decades, the use of intelligent Computer Graphics techniques is growing up year after year and more and more interesting techniques are presented in this area. The purpose of this volume is to present current work of the Intelligent Computer Graphics community, a community growing up year after year. This volume is a kind of continuation of the previously published Springer volumes “Artificial Intelligence Techniques for Computer Graphics” (2008), “Intelligent Computer Graphics 2009” (2009) and “Intelligent Computer Graphics 2010” (2010). This volume contains selected extended papers from the last 3IA Conference (3IA’2011), which has been held in Athens (Greece) in May 2011. This year papers are particularly exciting and concern areas like virtual reality, artificial life, data visualization, games, global illumination, point cloud modelling, declarative modelling, scene reconstruction and many other very important themes.

In this book, three main notions will be used in the editors search of improvements in various areas of computer graphics: Artificial Intelligence, Viewpoint Complexity and Human Intelligence. Several Artificial Intelligence techniques are used in presented intelligent scene modelers, mainly declarative ones. Among them, the mostly used techniques are Expert systems, Constraint Satisfaction Problem resolution and Machine-learning. The notion of viewpoint complexity, that is complexity of a scene seen from a given viewpoint, will be used in improvement proposals for a lot of computer graphics problems like scene understanding, virtual world exploration, image-based modeling and rendering, ray tracing and radiosity. Very often, viewpoint complexity is used in conjunction with Artificial Intelligence techniques like Heuristic search and Problem resolution. The notions of artificial Intelligence and Viewpoint Complexity may help to automatically resolve a big number of computer graphics problems. However, there are special situations where is required to find a particular solution for each situation. In such a case, human intelligence has to replace, or to be combined with, artificial intelligence. Such cases, and proposed solutions are also presented in this book.

Nowadays, intelligent techniques are more and more used in Computer Graphics in order to optimise the processing time, to find more accurate solutions for a lot of Computer Graphics problems, than with traditional methods, or simply to find solutions in problems where traditional methods fail. The purpose of this volume is to present current work of the Intelligent Computer Graphics community, a community growing up year after year. This volume is a kind of continuation of the previously published Springer volumes “Artificial Intelligence Techniques for Computer Graphics” (2008) and “Intelligent Computer Graphics 2009” (2009).This volume contains selected extended papers from the last 3IA Conference (3IA’2010), which has been held in Athens (Greece) in May 2010. This year papers are particularly exciting and concern areas like rendering, viewpoint quality, data visualisation, vision, computational aesthetics, scene understanding, intelligent lighting, declarative modelling, GIS, scene reconstruction and other important themes.

In Computer Graphics, the use of intelligent techniques started more recently than in other research areas. However, during these last two decades, the use of intelligent Computer Graphics techniques is growing up year after year and more and more interesting techniques are presented in this area. The purpose of this volume is to present current work of the Intelligent Computer Graphics community, a community growing up year after year. This volume is a kind of continuation of the previously published Springer volumes “Artificial Intelligence Techniques for Computer Graphics” (2008), “Intelligent Computer Graphics 2009” (2009), “Intelligent Computer Graphics 2010” (2010) and “Intelligent Computer Graphics 2011” (2011). Usually, this kind of volume contains, every year, selected extended papers from the corresponding 3IA Conference of the year. However, the current volume is made from directly reviewed and selected papers, submitted for publication in the volume “Intelligent Computer Graphics 2012”. This year papers are particularly exciting and concern areas like plant modelling, text-to-scene systems, information visualization, computer-aided geometric design, artificial life, computer games, realistic rendering and many other very important themes.

In Computer Graphics, the use of intelligent techniques started more recently than in other research areas. However, during these last two decades, the use of intelligent Computer Graphics techniques is growing up year after year and more and more interesting techniques are presented in this area. The purpose of this volume is to present current work of the Intelligent Computer Graphics community, a community growing up year after year. This volume is a kind of continuation of the previously published Springer volumes “Artificial Intelligence Techniques for Computer Graphics” (2008), “Intelligent Computer Graphics 2009” (2009), “Intelligent Computer Graphics 2010” (2010) and “Intelligent Computer Graphics 2011” (2011). Usually, this kind of volume contains, every year, selected extended papers from the corresponding 3IA Conference of the year. However, the current volume is made from directly reviewed and selected papers, submitted for publication in the volume “Intelligent Computer Graphics 2012”. This year papers are particularly exciting and concern areas like plant modelling, text-to-scene systems, information visualization, computer-aided geometric design, artificial life, computer games, realistic rendering and many other very important themes.

In Computer Graphics, the use of intelligent techniques started more recently than in other research areas. However, during these last two decades, the use of intelligent Computer Graphics techniques is growing up year after year and more and more interesting techniques are presented in this area. The purpose of this volume is to present current work of the Intelligent Computer Graphics community, a community growing up year after year. This volume is a kind of continuation of the previously published Springer volumes “Artificial Intelligence Techniques for Computer Graphics” (2008), “Intelligent Computer Graphics 2009” (2009) and “Intelligent Computer Graphics 2010” (2010). This volume contains selected extended papers from the last 3IA Conference (3IA’2011), which has been held in Athens (Greece) in May 2011. This year papers are particularly exciting and concern areas like virtual reality, artificial life, data visualization, games, global illumination, point cloud modelling, declarative modelling, scene reconstruction and many other very important themes.