Volume 33 (2014)
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Item Visualizing Multidimensional Data with Glyph SPLOMs(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2014) Yates, Andrew; Webb, Allison; Sharpnack, Michael; Chamberlin, Helen; Huang, Kun; Machiraju, Raghu; H. Carr, P. Rheingans, and H. SchumannScatterplot matrices or SPLOMs provide a feasible method of visualizing and representing multi-dimensional data especially for a small number of dimensions. For very high dimensional data, we introduce a novel technique to summarize a SPLOM, as a clustered matrix of glyphs, or a Glyph SPLOM. Each glyph visually encodes a general measure of dependency strength, distance correlation, and a logical dependency class based on the occupancy of the scatterplot quadrants. We present the Glyph SPLOM as a general alternative to the traditional correlation based heatmap and the scatterplot matrix in two examples: demography data from the World Health Organization (WHO), and gene expression data from developmental biology. By using both, dependency class and strength, the Glyph SPLOM illustrates high dimensional data in more detail than a heatmap but with more summarization than a SPLOM. More importantly, the summarization capabilities of Glyph SPLOM allow for the assertion of ''necessity'' causal relationships in the data and the reconstruction of interaction networks in various dynamic systems.Item Pose Partitioning for Multi-resolution Segmentation of Arbitrary Mesh Animations(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2014) Vasilakis, Andreas A.; Fudos, Ioannis; B. Levy and J. KautzWe present a complete approach to efficiently deriving a varying level-of-detail segmentation of arbitrary animated objects. An over-segmentation is built by combining sets of initial segments computed for each input pose, followed by a fast progressive simplification which aims at preserving rigid segments. The final segmentation result can be efficiently adjusted for cases where pose editing is performed or new poses are added at arbitrary positions in the mesh animation sequence. A smooth view of pose-to-pose segmentation transitions is offered by merging the partitioning of the current pose with that of the next pose. A perceptually friendly visualization scheme is also introduced for propagating segment colors between consecutive poses.We report on the efficiency and quality of our framework as compared to previous methods under a variety of skeletal and highly deformable mesh animations.Item Editing and Synthesizing Two-Character Motions using a Coupled Inverted Pendulum Model(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2014) Hwang, Jaepyung; Suh, Il Hong; Kwon, Taesoo; J. Keyser, Y. J. Kim, and P. WonkaThis study aims to develop a controller for use in the online simulation of two interacting characters. This controller is capable of generalizing two sets of interaction motions of the two characters based on the relationships between the characters. The controller can exhibit similar motions to a captured human motion while reacting in a natural way to the opponent character in real time. To achieve this, we propose a new type of physical model called a coupled inverted pendulum on carts that comprises two inverted pendulum on a cart models, one for each individual, which are coupled by a relationship model. The proposed framework is divided into two steps: motion analysis and motion synthesis. Motion analysis is an offline preprocessing step, which optimizes the control parameters to move the proposed model along a motion capture trajectory of two interacting humans. The optimization procedure generates a coupled pendulum trajectory which represents the relationship between two characters for each frame, and is used as a reference in the synthesis step. In the motion synthesis step, a new coupled pendulum trajectory is planned reflecting the effects of the physical interaction, and the captured reference motions are edited based on the planned trajectory produced by the coupled pendulum trajectory generator. To validate the proposed framework, we used a motion capture data set showing two people performing kickboxing. The proposed controller is able to generalize the behaviors of two humans to different situations such as different speeds and turning speeds in a realistic way in real time.Item Volumetric Data Reduction in a Compressed Sensing Framework(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2014) Xu, Xie; Sakhaee, Elham; Entezari, Alireza; H. Carr, P. Rheingans, and H. SchumannIn this paper, we investigate compressed sensing principles to devise an in-situ data reduction framework for visualization of volumetric datasets. We exploit the universality of the compressed sensing framework and show that the proposed method offers a refinable data reduction approach for volumetric datasets. The accurate reconstruction is obtained from partial Fourier measurements of the original data that are sensed without any prior knowledge of specific feature domains for the data. Our experiments demonstrate the superiority of surfacelets for efficient representation of volumetric data. Moreover, we establish that the accuracy of reconstruction can further improve once a more effective basis for a sparser representation of the data becomes available.Item Structural Analysis of Multivariate Point Clouds Using Simplicial Chains(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2014) Rieck, B.; Leitte, H.; Oliver Deussen and Hao (Richard) ZhangTopological and geometrical methods constitute common tools for the analysis of high‐dimensional scientific data sets. Geometrical methods such as projection algorithms focus on preserving distances in the data set. Topological methods such as contour trees, by contrast, focus on preserving structural and connectivity information. By combining both types of methods, we want to benefit from their individual advantages. To this end, we describe an algorithm that uses persistent homology to analyse the topology of a data set. Persistent homology identifies high‐dimensional holes in data sets, describing them as simplicial chains. We localize these chains using geometrical information of the data set, which we obtain from geodesic distances on a neighbourhood graph. The localized chains describe the structure of point clouds. We represent them using an interactive graph, in which each node describes a single chain and its geometrical properties. This graph yields a more intuitive understanding of multivariate point clouds and simplifies comparisons of time‐varying data. Our method focuses on detecting and analysing inhomogeneous regions, i.e. holes, in a data set because these regions characterize data in a different manner, thereby leading to new insights. We demonstrate the potential of our method on data sets from particle physics, political science and meteorology.We present simplicial chain graphs, a new visual metaphor for the analysis of multivariate point clouds. Our method first calculates the persistent homology of a data set. We represent topological features as simplicial chains, which we localize using geometrical information about the data set. We then display the simplicial chains and their relations in an interactive graph that serves as a concise structural description of multivariate point clouds.Item Parameter Estimation and Comparative Evaluation of Crowd Simulations(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2014) Wolinski, David; Guy, Stephen; Olivier, Anne-Helene; Lin, Ming; Manocha, Dinesh; Pettré, Julien; B. Levy and J. KautzWe present a novel framework to evaluate multi-agent crowd simulation algorithms based on real-world observations of crowd movements. A key aspect of our approach is to enable fair comparisons by automatically estimating the parameters that enable the simulation algorithms to best fit the given data. We formulate parameter estimation as an optimization problem, and propose a general framework to solve the combinatorial optimization problem for all parameterized crowd simulation algorithms. Our framework supports a variety of metrics to compare reference data and simulation outputs. The reference data may correspond to recorded trajectories, macroscopic parameters, or artist-driven sketches. We demonstrate the benefits of our framework for example-based simulation, modeling of cultural variations, artist-driven crowd animation, and relative comparison of some widely-used multi-agent simulation algorithms.Item Realistic Road Path Reconstruction from GIS Data(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2014) Nguyen, Hoang Ha; Desbenoit, Brett; Daniel, Marc; J. Keyser, Y. J. Kim, and P. WonkaWe introduce a new approach to construct smooth piecewise curves representing realistic road paths. Given a GIS database of road networks in which sampled points are organized in 3D polylines, our method creates horizontal, then vertical curves, and finally combines them to produce 3D road paths. We first estimate the possibility of each point of being a junction between two separate primitive curve segments. Next, we design a tree-traversal algorithm to expand sequences of local best fit primitives which are then merged together with respect to the G1 continuity constraint and civil engineering rules. We apply the Levenberg-Marquardt method to minimize the error between the resulting curve and the sampled points while preserving the G1 continuity.Item User-Assisted Video Stabilization(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2014) Bai, Jiamin; Agarwala, Aseem; Agrawala, Maneesh; Ramamoorthi, Ravi; Wojciech Jarosz and Pieter PeersWe present a user-assisted video stabilization algorithm that is able to stabilize challenging videos when stateof- the-art automatic algorithms fail to generate a satisfactory result. Current methods do not give the user any control over the look of the final result. Users either have to accept the stabilized result as is, or discard it should the stabilization fail to generate a smooth output. Our system introduces two new modes of interaction that allow the user to improve the unsatisfactory stabilized video. First, we cluster tracks and visualize them on the warped video. The user ensures that appropriate tracks are selected by clicking on track clusters to include or exclude them. Second, the user can directly specify how regions in the output video should look by drawing quadrilaterals to select and deform parts of the frame. These user-provided deformations reduce undesirable distortions in the video. Our algorithm then computes a stabilized video using the user-selected tracks, while respecting the usermodified regions. The process of interactively removing user-identified artifacts can sometimes introduce new ones, though in most cases there is a net improvement.We demonstrate the effectiveness of our system with a variety of challenging hand held videos.Item Designing Large-Scale Interactive Traffic Animations for Urban Modeling(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2014) Garcia-Dorado, Ignacio; Aliaga, Daniel G.; Ukkusuri, Satish V.; B. Levy and J. KautzDesigning and optimizing traffic behavior and animation is a challenging problem of interest to virtual environment content generation and to urban planning and design. While some traffic simulation methods have appeared in computer graphics, most related systems focus on the design of buildings, roads, or cities but without explicitly considering urban traffic. To our knowledge, our work provides the first interactive approach which enables a designer to specify a desired vehicular traffic behavior (e.g., road occupancy, travel time, emissions, etc.) and the system will automatically compute what realistic 3D urban model (e.g., an interconnected network of roads, parcels, and buildings) yields the specified behavior. Our system both altered and improved traffic behavior in novel procedurally-generated cities and in road networks of existing cities. Our urban models contain up to 360 km of roads, 300,000 vehicles, and typically cover four hours of simulated peak traffic time. The typical editing session time to "paint" a new traffic pattern and to compute the new/changed urban model is two to five minutes.Item Mandatory Critical Points of 2D Uncertain Scalar Fields(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2014) Günther, David; Salmon, Joseph; Tierny, Julien; H. Carr, P. Rheingans, and H. SchumannThis paper introduces a novel, non-local characterization of critical points and their global relation in 2D uncertain scalar fields. The characterization is based on the analysis of the support of the probability density functions (PDF) of the input data. Given two scalar fields representing reliable estimations of the bounds of this support, our strategy identifies mandatory critical points: spatial regions and function ranges where critical points have to occur in any realization of the input. The algorithm provides a global pairing scheme for mandatory critical points which is used to construct mandatory join and split trees. These trees enable a visual exploration of the common topological structure of all possible realizations of the uncertain data. To allow multi-scale visualization, we introduce a simplification scheme for mandatory critical point pairs revealing the most dominant features. Our technique is purely combinatorial and handles parametric distribution models and ensemble data. It does not depend on any computational parameter and does not suffer from numerical inaccuracy or global inconsistency. The algorithm exploits ideas of the established join/split tree computation. It is therefore simple to implement, and its complexity is output-sensitive. We illustrate, evaluate, and verify our method on synthetic and real-world data.Item Controlled Metamorphosis Between Skeleton‐Driven Animated Polyhedral Meshes of Arbitrary Topologies(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2014) Kravtsov, Denis; Fryazinov, Oleg; Adzhiev, Valery; Pasko, Alexander; Comninos, Peter; Holly Rushmeier and Oliver DeussenEnabling animators to smoothly transform between animated meshes of differing topologies is a long‐standing problem in geometric modelling and computer animation. In this paper, we propose a new hybrid approach built upon the advantages of scalar field‐based models (often called implicit surfaces) which can easily change their topology by changing their defining scalar field. Given two meshes, animated by their rigging‐skeletons, we associate each mesh with its own approximating implicit surface. This implicit surface moves synchronously with the mesh. The shape‐metamorphosis process is performed in several steps: first, we collapse the two meshes to their corresponding approximating implicit surfaces, then we transform between the two implicit surfaces and finally we inverse transition from the resulting metamorphosed implicit surface to the target mesh. The examples presented in this paper demonstrating the results of the proposed technique were implemented using an in‐house plug‐in for Maya™.Enabling animators to smoothly transform between animated meshes of differing topologies is a long‐standing problem in geometric modelling and computer animation. In this paper, we propose a new hybrid approach built upon the advantages of scalar field‐based models (often called implicit surfaces) which can easily change their topology by changing their defining scalar field. Given two meshes, animated by their rigging‐skeletons, we associate each mesh with its own approximating implicit surface. This implicit surface moves synchronously with the mesh. The shape‐metamorphosis process is performed in several steps: first, we collapse the two meshes to their corresponding approximating implicit surfaces, then we transform between the two implicit surfaces.Item Projection Mapping on Arbitrary Cubic Cell Complexes(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2014) Apaza‐Agüero, K.; Silva, L.; Bellon, O. R. P. ; Holly Rushmeier and Oliver DeussenThis work presents a new representation used as a rendering primitive of surfaces. Our representation is defined by an arbitrary cubic cell complex: a projection‐based parameterization domain for surfaces where geometry and appearance information are stored as tile textures. This representation is used by our ray casting rendering algorithm called projection mapping, which can be used for rendering geometry and appearance details of surfaces from arbitrary viewpoints. The projection mapping algorithm uses a fragment shader based on linear and binary searches of the relief mapping algorithm. Instead of traditionally rendering the surface, only front faces of our rendering primitive (our arbitrary cubic cell complex) are drawn, and geometry and appearance details of the surface are rendered back by using projection mapping. Alternatively, another method is proposed for mapping appearance information on complex surfaces using our arbitrary cubic cell complexes. In this case, instead of reconstructing the geometry as in projection mapping, the original mesh of a surface is directly passed to the rendering algorithm. This algorithm is applied in the texture mapping of cultural heritage sculptures.This work presents a new representation used as a rendering primitive of surfaces. Our representation is defined by an arbitrary cubic cell complex: a projection‐based parameterization domain for surfaces where geometry and appearance information are stored as tile textures. This representation is used by our ray casting rendering algorithm called projection mapping, which can be used for rendering geometry and appearance details of surfaces from arbitrary viewpoints. Alternatively, another method is proposed for mapping appearance information on complex surfaces using our arbitrary cubic cell complexes. In this case, instead of reconstructing the geometry as in projection mapping, the original mesh of a surface is directly passed to the rendering algorithm.Item Approximate Symmetry Detection in Partial 3D Meshes(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2014) Sipiran, Ivan; Gregor, Robert; Schreck, Tobias; J. Keyser, Y. J. Kim, and P. WonkaSymmetry is a common characteristic in natural and man-made objects. Its ubiquitous nature can be exploited to facilitate the analysis and processing of computational representations of real objects. In particular, in computer graphics, the detection of symmetries in 3D geometry has enabled a number of applications in modeling and reconstruction. However, the problem of symmetry detection in incomplete geometry remains a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a vote-based approach to detect symmetry in 3D shapes, with special interest in models with large missing parts. Our algorithm generates a set of candidate symmetries by matching local maxima of a surface function based on the heat diffusion in local domains, which guarantee robustness to missing data. In order to deal with local perturbations, we propose a multi-scale surface function that is useful to select a set of distinctive points over which the approximate symmetries are defined. In addition, we introduce a vote-based scheme that is aware of the partiality, and therefore reduces the number of false positive votes for the candidate symmetries. We show the effectiveness of our method in a varied set of 3D shapes and different levels of partiality. Furthermore, we show the applicability of our algorithm in the repair and completion of challenging reassembled objects in the context of cultural heritage.Item Pathline Glyphs(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2014) Hlawatsch, Marcel; Sadlo, Filip; Jang, Hajun; Weiskopf, Daniel; B. Levy and J. KautzVisualization of pathlines is common and highly relevant for the analysis of unsteady flow. However, pathlines can intersect, leading to visual clutter and perceptual issues. This makes it intrinsically difficult to provide expressive visualizations of the entire domain by an arrangement of multiple pathlines, in contrast to well-established streamline placement techniques. We present an approach to reduce these problems. It is inspired by glyph-based visualization and small multiples: we partition the domain into cells, each corresponding to a downscaled version of the entire domain. Inside these cells, a single downscaled pathline is drawn. On the overview scale, our pathline glyphs lead to emergent visual patterns that provide insight into time-dependent flow behavior. Zooming-in allows us to analyze individual pathlines in detail and compare neighboring lines. The overall approach is complemented with a context-preserving zoom lens and interactive pathline-based exploration. While we primarily target the visualization of 2D flow, we also address the extension to 3D. Our evaluation includes several examples, comparison to other flow visualization techniques, and a user study with domain experts.Item Spectral Ray Differentials(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2014) Elek, Oskar; Bauszat, Pablo; Ritschel, Tobias; Magnor, Marcus; Seidel, Hans-Peter; Wojciech Jarosz and Pieter PeersLight refracted by a dispersive interface leads to beautifully colored patterns that can be rendered faithfully with spectral Monte-Carlo methods. Regrettably, results often suffer from chromatic noise or banding, requiring high sampling rates and large amounts of memory compared to renderers operating in some trichromatic color space. Addressing this issue, we introduce spectral ray differentials, which describe the change of light direction with respect to changes in the spectrum. In analogy with the classic ray and photon differentials, this information can be used for filtering in the spectral domain. Effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated by filtering for offline spectral light and path tracing as well as for an interactive GPU photon mapper based on splatting. Our results show considerably less chromatic noise and spatial aliasing while retaining good visual similarity to reference solutions with negligible overhead in the order of milliseconds.Item SAFE: Structure-aware Facade Editing(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2014) Dang, Minh; Ceylan, Duygu; Neubert, Boris; Pauly, Mark; B. Levy and J. KautzMany man-made objects, in particular building facades, exhibit dominant structural relations such as symmetry and regularity. When editing these shapes, a common objective is to preserve these relations. However, often there are numerous plausible editing results that all preserve the desired structural relations of the input, creating ambiguity. We propose an interactive facade editing framework that explores this structural ambiguity. We first analyze the input in a semi-automatic manner to detect different groupings of the facade elements and the relations among them. We then provide an incremental editing process where a set of variations that preserve the detected relations in a particular grouping are generated at each step. Starting from one input example, our system can quickly generate various facade configurationsItem As-Conformal-As-Possible Surface Registration(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2014) Yoshiyasu, Yusuke; Ma, Wan-Chun; Yoshida, Eiichi; Kanehiro, Fumio; Thomas Funkhouser and Shi-Min HuWe present a non-rigid surface registration technique that can align surfaces with sizes and shapes that are different from each other, while avoiding mesh distortions during deformation. The registration is constrained locally as conformal as possible such that the angles of triangle meshes are preserved, yet local scales are allowed to change. Based on our conformal registration technique, we devise an automatic registration and interactive registration technique, which can reduce user interventions during template fitting. We demonstrate the versatility of our technique on a wide range of surfaces.Item A Survey of Volumetric Illumination Techniques for Interactive Volume Rendering(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2014) Jönsson, Daniel; Sundén, Erik; Ynnerman, Anders; Ropinski, Timo; Holly Rushmeier and Oliver DeussenInteractive volume rendering in its standard formulation has become an increasingly important tool in many application domains. In recent years several advanced volumetric illumination techniques to be used in interactive scenarios have been proposed. These techniques claim to have perceptual benefits as well as being capable of producing more realistic volume rendered images. Naturally, they cover a wide spectrum of illumination effects, including varying shading and scattering effects. In this survey, we review and classify the existing techniques for advanced volumetric illumination. The classification will be conducted based on their technical realization, their performance behaviour as well as their perceptual capabilities. Based on the limitations revealed in this review, we will define future challenges in the area of interactive advanced volumetric illumination.Interactive volume rendering in its standard formulation has become an increasingly important tool in many application domains. In recent years several advanced volumetric illumination techniques to be used in interactive scenarios have been proposed. These techniques claim to have perceptual benefits as well as being capable of producing more realistic volume rendered images. Naturally, they cover a wide spectrum of illumination effects, including varying shading and scattering effects. In this survey, we review and classify the existing techniques for advanced volumetric illumination. The classification will be conducted based on their technical realization, their performance behavior as well as their perceptual capabilities.Item Stackless Multi‐BVH Traversal for CPU, MIC and GPU Ray Tracing(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2014) Áfra, Attila T.; Szirmay‐Kalos, László; Holly Rushmeier and Oliver DeussenStackless traversal algorithms for ray tracing acceleration structures require significantly less storage per ray than ordinary stack‐based ones. This advantage is important for massively parallel rendering methods, where there are many rays in flight. On SIMD architectures, a commonly used acceleration structure is the MBVH, which has multiple bounding boxes per node for improved parallelism. It scales to branching factors higher than two, for which, however, only stack‐based traversal methods have been proposed so far. In this paper, we introduce a novel stackless traversal algorithm for MBVHs with up to four‐way branching. Our approach replaces the stack with a small bitmask, supports dynamic ordered traversal, and has a low computation overhead. We also present efficient implementation techniques for recent CPU, MIC (Intel Xeon Phi) and GPU (NVIDIA Kepler) architectures.Stackless traversal algorithms for ray tracing acceleration structures require significantly less storage per ray than ordinary stack‐based ones. This advantage is important for massively parallel rendering methods, where there are many rays in flight. On SIMD architectures, a commonly used acceleration structure is the multi bounding volume hierarchy (MBVH), which has multiple bounding boxes per node for improved parallelism. It scales to branching factors higher than two, for which, however, only stack‐based traversal methods have been proposed so far. In this paper, we introduce a novel stackless traversal algorithm for MBVHs with up to 4‐way branching.Item LoVis: Local Pattern Visualization for Model Refinement(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2014) Zhao, Kaiyu; Ward, Matthew O.; Rundensteiner, Elke A.; Higgins, Huong N.; H. Carr, P. Rheingans, and H. SchumannLinear models are commonly used to identify trends in data. While it is an easy task to build linear models using pre-selected variables, it is challenging to select the best variables from a large number of alternatives. Most metrics for selecting variables are global in nature, and thus not useful for identifying local patterns. In this work, we present an integrated framework with visual representations that allows the user to incrementally build and verify models in three model spaces that support local pattern discovery and summarization: model complementarity, model diversity, and model representivity. Visual representations are designed and implemented for each of the model spaces. Our visualizations enable the discovery of complementary variables, i.e., those that perform well in modeling different subsets of data points. They also support the isolation of local models based on a diversity measure. Furthermore, the system integrates a hierarchical representation to identify the outlier local trends and the local trends that share similar directions in the model space. A case study on financial risk analysis is discussed, followed by a user study.