Synthesis Lectures on Visual Computing: Computer Graphics, Animation, Computational Photography and Imaging – serie

This book serves as a practical guide to simulation of 3D deformable solids using the Finite Element Method (FEM).

Virtual agents are given perceptual capabilities analogous to those of real people, including sound perception, multi-sense attention, and understanding of environment semantics which affect their behavior choices.

After an introduction to the goals of the book, we present a brief description of both worlds of visualization (Chapter 2) and verification (Chapter 3).

Path planning and navigation are indispensable components for controlling autonomous agents in interactive virtual worlds. The use of planning algorithms beyond path planning is also discussed in the areas of crowd animation and whole-body motion planning for virtual characters.

To this end, it presents and compares methods that process and analyze the massive amount of geospatial data in order to support better management of societal challenges through more timely and better decision making, independent of a specific data modeling paradigm (e.g., 2D vector data, regular grids or 3D point clouds).

This book is written for students, CAD system users and software developers who are interested in geometric continuity—a notion needed in everyday practice of Computer-Aided Design and also a hot subject of research.

Heritage sites across the world have witnessed a number of natural calamities, sabotage and damage from visitors, resulting in their present ruined condition. Many sites are now restricted to reduce the risk of further damage. Yet these masterpieces are significant cultural icons and critical markers of past civilizations that future generations need to see. A digitally reconstructed heritage site could diminish further harm by using immersive navigation or walkthrough systems for virtual environments. An exciting key element for the viewer is observing fine details of the historic work and viewing monuments in their undamaged form. This book presents image super-resolution methods and techniques for automatically detecting and inpainting damaged regions in heritage monuments, in order to provide an enhanced visual experience.The book presents techniques to obtain higher resolution photographs of the digitally reconstructed monuments, and the resulting images can serve as input to immersive walkthrough systems. It begins with the discussion of two novel techniques for image super-resolution and an approach for inpainting a user-supplied region in the given image, followed by a technique to simultaneously perform super-resolution and inpainting of given missing regions. It then introduces a method for automatically detecting and repairing the damage to dominant facial regions in statues, followed by a few approaches for automatic crack repair in images of heritage scenes. This book is a giant step toward ensuring that the iconic sites of our past are always available, and will never be truly lost.

This synthesis lecture presents an intuitive introduction to the mathematics of motion and deformation in computer graphics. Starting with familiar concepts in graphics, such as Euler angles, quaternions, and affine transformations, we illustrate that a mathematical theory behind these concepts enables us to develop the techniques for efficient/effective creation of computer animation.This book, therefore, serves as a good guidepost to mathematics (differential geometry and Lie theory) for students of geometric modeling and animation in computer graphics. Experienced developers and researchers will also benefit from this book, since it gives a comprehensive overview of mathematical approaches that are particularly useful in character modeling, deformation, and animation.

In geometry processing and shape analysis, several applications have been addressed through the properties of the Laplacian spectral kernels and distances, such as commute time, biharmonic, diffusion, and wave distances.Within this context, this book is intended to provide a common background on the definition and computation of the Laplacian spectral kernels and distances for geometry processing and shape analysis. To this end, we define a unified representation of the isotropic and anisotropic discrete Laplacian operator on surfaces and volumes; then, we introduce the associated differential equations, i.e., the harmonic equation, the Laplacian eigenproblem, and the heat equation. Filtering the Laplacian spectrum, we introduce the Laplacian spectral distances, which generalize the commute-time, biharmonic, diffusion, and wave distances, and their discretization in terms of the Laplacian spectrum. As main applications, we discuss the design of smooth functions and the Laplacian smoothing of noisy scalar functions.All the reviewed numerical schemes are discussed and compared in terms of robustness, approximation accuracy, and computational cost, thus supporting the reader in the selection of the most appropriate with respect to shape representation, computational resources, and target application.

In image processing and computer vision applications such as medical or scientific image data analysis, as well as in industrial scenarios, images are used as input measurement data.

This book provides beginners in computer graphics and related fields a guide to the concepts, models, and technologies for realistic rendering of material appearance.

The wide diffusion of 3D printing technologies continuously calls for effective solutions for designing and fabricating objects of increasing complexity.

Cloth simulation is no different and is ubiquitous because most virtual characters (hopefully!) wear some sort of clothing.The focus of this book is physics-based cloth simulation.

Despite the existence of professional image editing software that can complete complex image editing work, the skills required to achieve satisfactory editing results can be prohibitive, and even professional image editors need to spend a lot of time developing and maintaining aptitude in a niche tool.

Despite the existence of professional image editing software that can complete complex image editing work, the skills required to achieve satisfactory editing results can be prohibitive, and even professional image editors need to spend a lot of time developing and maintaining aptitude in a niche tool.

This book explores the visualization of three-dimensional non-Euclidean spaces using ray-tracing techniques in Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). This is a trending topic in mathematical visualization that combines the mathematics areas of geometry and topology, with visualization concepts of computer graphics.

This book gives a broad overview of research on sound simulation driven by a variety of applications.

Table of Contents: Introduction / Crowd Simulation Methodology Survey / Individual Differences in Crowds / Framework (HiDAC + MACES + CAROSA) / HiDAC: Local Motion / MACES: Wayfinding with Communication and Roles / CAROSA: Functional Crowds / Initializing a Scenario / Evaluating Crowds

In this lecture, we study Bézier and B-spline curves and surfaces, mathematical representations for free-form curves and surfaces that are common in CAD systems and are used to design aircraft and automobiles, as well as in modeling packages used by the computer animation industry.

The human haptic system, among all senses, provides unique and bidirectional communication between humans and their physical environment. It presents novel haptic rendering algorithms that take advantage of the human haptic sensory modality.

High dynamic range imaging (HDRI) is an emerging field that has the potential to cause a great scientific and technological impact in the near future. Table of Contents: Introduction / Digital Image / Imaging Devices and Calibration / HDR Reconstruction / HDRI Acquisition and Visualization / Tone Enhancement / References / Biography

This book presents techniques to render photo-realistic images by programming the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). We discuss effects such as mirror reflections, refractions, caustics, diffuse or glossy indirect illumination, radiosity, single or multiple scattering in participating media, tone reproduction, glow, and depth of field. The book targets game developers, graphics programmers, and also students with some basic understanding of computer graphics algorithms, rendering APIs like Direct3D or OpenGL, and shader programming. In order to make the book self-contained, the most important concepts of local illumination and global illumination rendering, graphics hardware, and Direct3D/HLSL programming are reviewed in the first chapters. After these introductory chapters we warm up with simple methods including shadow and environment mapping, then we move on toward advanced concepts aiming at global illumination rendering. Since it would have been impossible to give a rigorous review of all approaches proposed in this field, we go into the details of just a few methods solving each particular global illumination effect. However, a short discussion of the state of the art and links to the bibliography are also provided to refer the interested reader to techniques that are not detailed in this book. The implementation of the selected methods is also presented in HLSL, and we discuss their observed performance, merits, and disadvantages. In the last chapter, we also review how these techniques can be integrated in an advanced game engine and present case studies of their exploitation in games. Having gone through this book, the reader will have an overview of the state of the art, will be able to apply and improve these techniques, and most importantly, will be capable of developing brand new GPU algorithms. Table of Contents: Global Illumintation Rendering / Local Illumination Rendering Pipeline of GPUs / Programming and Controlling GPUs / Simple Improvements of the Local Illumination Model / Ray Casting on the GPU / Specular Effects with Rasterization / Diffuse and Glossy Indirect Illumination / Pre-computation Aided Global Illumination / Participating Media Rendering / Fake Global Illumination / Postprocessing Effects / Integrating GI Effects in Games and Virtual Reality Systems / Bibliography

Table of Contents: Introduction / Representation of an HDR Image / HDR Image and Video Acquisition / HDR Image Quality / HDR Image, Video, and Texture Compression / Tone Reproduction / HDR Display Devices / LDR2HDR: Recovering Dynamic Range in Legacy Content / HDRI in Computer Graphics / Software

Interactive display and visualization of large geometric and textured models is becoming a fundamental capability. One of observations about geometric models used in interactive applications is that their model complexity continues to increase because of fundamental advances in 3D modeling, simulation, and data capture technologies.

Providing an intuitive modeling system, which would enable us to communicate about any free-form shape we have in mind at least as quickly as with real-world tools, is one of the main challenges of digital shape design.

A tile-based method for generating a complex signal consists of a method for synthesizing the signal over a set of Wang tiles or corner tiles, and a method for generating a stochastic tiling using the set of tiles. This book covers scanline stochastic tiling algorithms and direct stochastic tiling algorithms for Wang tiles and corner tiles.

Table of Contents: Introduction to Ray Tracing and Global Illumination / Irradiance Caching Core / Practical Rendering with Irradiance Caching / Irradiance Caching in a Complete Global Illumination / Irradiance Caching on Graphics Hardware / Temporal Irradiance Caching

Tiling theory is an elegant branch of mathematics that has applications in several areas of computer science.Table of Contents: Introduction / Tiling Basics / Symmetry / Tilings by Polygons / Isohedral Tilings / Nonperiodic and Aperiodic Tilings / Survey

Table of Contents: Information Theory Basics / Scene Complexity and Refinement Criteria for Radiosity / Shape Descriptors / Refinement Criteria for Ray-Tracing / Viewpoint Selection and Mesh Saliency / View Selection in Scientific Visualization / Viewpoint-based Geometry Simplification