Computer Graphics: Systems and Applications – serie

Document imaging is a new discipline in applied computer science. It is building bridges between computer graphics, the world of prepress and press, and the areas of color vision and color reproduction. The focus of this book is of special relevance to people learning how to utilize and integrate such available technology as digital printing or short run color, how to make use of CIM techniques for print products, and how to evaluate related technologies that will become relevant in the next few years. This book is the first to give a comprehensive overview of document imaging, the areas involved, and how they relate. For readers with a background in computer graphics it gives insight into all problems related to putting information in print, a field only very thinly covered in textbooks on computer graphics.

Just a few years ago, virtual reality was regarded as more a toy than a tool. Today, however, it is becoming the enabling technology for man-machine communications. The rapid development of graphics hardware and soft­ ware makes its application possible. Besides building walkthroughs and landscape fly-overs with very realistic visual effects, we can recognize the trend toward industrial applications. This is because of the emerging need for tools for rapid product development. Especially in the aeronautical and automotive industries, companies have began to investigate and develop virtual reality tools for their own needs in co-operation with research or­ ganizations. In co-operation with the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics (IGD), the Computer Graphics Center (ZGDV) in Darmstadt established the German working group on virtual reality in 1993 as a forum for infor­ mation exchange between industry and research. German researchers, system developers, and industrial users have met several times in Darm­ stadt at the Computer Graphics Center. In these meetings they discussed the essential issues inherent in applying virtual reality to industrial appli­ cations and exchanged their latest research results and experiences.

Document imaging is a new discipline in applied computer science. It is building bridges between computer graphics, the world of prepress and press, and the areas of color vision and color reproduction. The focus of this book is of special relevance to people learning how to utilize and integrate such available technology as digital printing or short run color, how to make use of CIM techniques for print products, and how to evaluate related technologies that will become relevant in the next few years. This book is the first to give a comprehensive overview of document imaging, the areas involved, and how they relate. For readers with a background in computer graphics it gives insight into all problems related to putting information in print, a field only very thinly covered in textbooks on computer graphics.

This book is based on lectures presented at an international workshop on geometric modeling held at Hewlett Packard GmbH in Boblingen, FRG, in June 1990. International experts from academia and industry were selected to speak on the most interesting topics in geometric modeling. The resulting papers, published in this volume, give a state-of-the-art survey of the relevant problems and issues. The following topics are discussed: - Methods for constructing surfaces on surfaces: four different solutions to the multidimen­ sional problem of constructing an interpolant from surface data are provided. - Surfaces in solid modeling: current results on the implementation of free-fonn solids in three well established solid models are reviewed. - Box splines and applications: an introduction to box spline methods for the representation of surfaces is given. Basic properties of box splines are derived, and refinement and evaluation methods for box splines are presented in detail. Shape preserving properties, the construction of non-rectangular box spline surfaces, applications to surface modeling, and imbedding problems, are discussed. - Advanced computer graphics techniques for volume visualization: the steps to be executed in the visualization process of volume data are described and tools are discussed that assist in handling this data. - Rational B-splines: an introduction to the representation of curves and surfaces using rational B-splines is given, together with a critical evaluation of their potential for industrial application.

1 Aims and Features of This Book The contents of t. his book were originally planned t. o be included in a book en­ titled Geometric lIIodeling and CAD/CAM to be written by M. Hosaka and F. Kimura, but since the draft. of my part of the book was finished much earlier than Kimura's, we decided to publish this part separately at first. In it, geometrically oriented basic methods and tools used for analysis and synthesis of curves and surfaces used in CAD/CAM, various expressions and manipulations of free-form surface patches and their connection, interference as well as their qualit. y eval­ uation are treated. They are important elements and procedures of geometric models. And construction and utilization of geometric models which include free-form surfaces are explained in the application examples, in which the meth­ ods and the techniques described in this book were used. In the succeeding book which Kimura is to write, advanced topics such as data structures of geometric models, non-manifold models, geometric inference as well as tolerance problems and product models, process planning and so on are to be included. Conse­ quently, the title of this book is changed to Modeling of Curves and Surfaces in CAD/CAM. Features of this book are the following. Though there are excellent text books in the same field such as G. Farin's Curves and Surfaces for CAD /CAM[l] and C. M.

One of the important issues of Scientific Visualization is the utilization of the broad bandwidth of the human sensory system in steering and interpreting complex processes and simulations involving voluminous data sets across diverse scientific disciplines. This book presents the state-of-the-art in visualization techniques both as an overview for the inquiring scientist, and as a solid platform from which developers may extend existing techniques or devise new ones to meet the specific needs of their problems. A secondary goal in crafting this volume has been to provide a vehicle for teaching of state-of-the-art techniques in scientific visualization. The first part of the book covers the application areas fluid flow visualization in medicine, and environmental protection. The second set of chapters explain fundamentals of scientific visualization. It comprises contributions on data structuring and data administration, data modeling, and rendering. A final section is devoted to auditory representation of scientific data.

Multimedia techniques enable the production of non-traditional documents containing enourmous amounts of information. The production of such documents by a group, as opposed to an individual, is the main subject of this book. A group needs to communicate, and multimedia technology can be used to enhance group communication. How multimedia documentation and communication and groups of authors fit together are the main questions tackled. The book describes the construction of a conceptual framework and the prototype system, CoMEdiA, as well as how the system was used to conduct a group effectiveness study involving two applications: cooperative software engineering and data production. Thus the work relates to multimedia communication, cooperative editing, and group support and effectiveness.

A little more than a decade ago my colleagues and I faced the necessity for providing a database management system which might commonly serve a number of different types of computer aided design applications at different manufacturing enterprises. We evaluated some wellknown cases of conceptual models and commercially available DBMSs, and found none fuHy meeting the requirements. Yet the analysis of them led us to the development of what we named the Logical Structure Management System (LMS). Syntactically the LMS language is somewhat similar to ALPHA by E. F. Codd. The underly­ ing conceptual model is entirely different from that of the relational model, however. LMS has been since put into practical use, meanwhile a further ef­ fort in search of asound theoretical base and a concrete linguistic framework for true product modeling together with comparative studies of various ap­ proaches has been made. Here, the term product modeling is used to signify the construction of informational models of design objects and design pro­ cesses in which it must be possible to include not a fixed set of attributes and relations, such as geometry, physical properties, part-of hierarchy, etc. , but whatever aspects of design designers may desire to be included. The purpose of this book is to present the major results of the said effort, which are primarily of a theoretical or conceptual nature. Following the intro­ duction (Chap.

Advances in computing and communications have brought about an increasing demand for visual information. Visual Computing addresses the principles behind "visual technology", and provides readers with a good understanding of how the integration of Computer Graphics, Visual Perception and Imaging is achieved. Included in the book is an overview of important research areas within this integration which will be useful for further work in the field. Foundations of visual perception and psychophysics are presented as well as basic methods of imaging and computer vision. This book serves as an excellent reference and textbook for those who wish to apply or study "visual computing technology."