一种复杂场景遮挡剔除的优化算法

采用GPU的遮挡查询功能提出了一种复杂场景的层次遮挡剔除算法,通过交替进行遮挡查询和可见节点的绘制,有效地减少了由于遮挡查询延迟造成的空闲等待时间.为了减少场景中不必要的遮挡测试,将遮挡查询问题描述为最优化决策问题,通过对每一帧遮挡查询的选择进行优化,能够使整个场景绘制的效率近似达到最优.实验结果表明,对于不同复杂度的场景,该算法可以明显地提高场景的绘制速度.     

High‐Quality Screen‐Space Ambient Occlusion using Temporal Coherence

Ambient occlusion is a cheap but effective approximation of global illumination. Recently, screen‐space ambient occlusion (SSAO) methods, which sample the frame buffer as a discretization of the scene geometry, have become very popular for real‐time rendering. We present temporal SSAO (TSSAO), a new algorithm which exploits temporal coherence to produce high‐quality ambient occlusion in real time. Compared to conventional SSAO, our method reduces both noise as well as blurring artefacts due to strong spatial filtering, faithfully representing fine‐grained geometric structures. Our algorithm caches and reuses previously computed SSAO samples, and adaptively applies more samples and spatial filtering only in regions that do not yet have enough information available from previous frames. The method works well for both static and dynamic scenes.     

CHC+RT: Coherent Hierarchical Culling for Ray Tracing

We propose a new technique for in‐core and out‐of‐core GPU ray tracing using a generalization of hierarchical occlusion culling in the style of the CHC++ method. Our method exploits the rasterization pipeline and hardware occlusion queries in order to create coherent batches of work for localized shader‐based ray tracing kernels. By combining hierarchies in both ray space and object space, the method is able to share intermediate traversal results among multiple rays. We exploit temporal coherence among similar ray sets between frames and also within the given frame. A suitable management of the current visibility state makes it possible to benefit from occlusion culling for less coherent ray types like diffuse reflections. Since large scenes are still a challenge for modern GPU ray tracers, our method is most useful for scenes with medium to high complexity, especially since our method inherently supports ray tracing highly complex scenes that do not fit in GPU memory. For in‐core scenes our method is comparable to CUDA ray tracing and performs up to 5.94 × better than pure shader‐based ray tracing.     

Progressive Hulls for Intersection Applications

Progressive meshes are an established tool for triangle mesh simplification. By suitably adapting the simplification process, progressive hulls can be generated which enclose the original mesh in gradually simpler, nested meshes. We couple progressive hulls with a selective refinement framework and use them in applications involving intersection queries on the mesh. We demonstrate that selectively refinable progressive hulls considerably speed up intersection queries by efficiently locating intersection points on the mesh. Concerning the progressive hull construction, we propose a new formula for assigning edge collapse priorities that significantly accelerates the simplification process, and enhance the existing algorithm with several conditions aimed at producing higher quality hulls. Using progressive hulls has the added advantage that they can be used instead of the enclosed object when a lower resolution of display can be tolerated, thus speeding up the rendering process. ACM CSS: I.3.3 Computer Graphics—Picture/Image Generation, I.3.5 Computer Graphics—Computational Geometry and Object Modeling, I.3.7 Computer Graphics—Three‐Dimensional Graphics and Realism     

Analysis of coherence strategies for stereo occlusion culling

This paper explores the benefits that can be achieved for stereoscopic visualization when using occlusion culling strategies. Graphics processing units (GPUs) are improving their computational power and functionalities. On the other hand, models are also increasing their size and users require more demanding image quality. Occlusion culling provides significant frame rate speed‐ups in densely occluded scenarios. This paper shows the limitations placed by compact and not densely occluded scenarios and the gains that can be achieved when rendering stereo images using occlusion culling. The experiments carried out test combinations of occlusion stereo coherence and occlusion frame coherence. The methods also take advantage of efficient depth sorting strategy and aggressive occlusion frame coherence, whose image artefacts have been found to be negligible. Results clearly point out that eye‐independent frame coherence offers more benefits than mixing frame and stereo coherence. As in monoscopic occlusion culling, using simplified geometric models, instead of bounding boxes, when posting occlusion queries, improves significantly the number of objects discriminated as occluded. The algorithm presented can be easily implemented and provides a significant boost in performances. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Automatic Hybrid Hierarchy Creation: a Cost-model Based Approach

While using hierarchical search structures has been proved as one of the most efficient acceleration techniques when rendering complex scenes, automatic creation of appropriate hierarchies is not solved yet. Well‐known algorithms for automatic creation of bounding volume hierarchies are not enough. Higher performance is achieved by introducing spatial uniform subdivision, although algorithms proposed up to now are not truly automatic, as they need some parameters to be adjusted. In this paper we present a full‐automatic hierarchy creation scheme that structures the scene in a hybrid way, combining bounding volumes and voxel grids in the same tree, selecting the search structure that best fits to each scene region. It uses no parameters at all. This efficient proposal relies on a new cost model that estimates the goodness of a hybrid hierarchy if used for rendering the scene. ACM CSS: I.3.7 Computer Graphics—Three‐Dimensional Graphics and Realism     

Motion Blur for EWA Surface Splatting

This paper presents a novel framework for elliptical weighted average (EWA) surface splatting with time‐varying scenes. We extend the theoretical basis of the original framework by replacing the 2D surface reconstruction filters by 3D kernels which unify the spatial and temporal component of moving objects. Based on the newly derived mathematical framework we introduce a rendering algorithm that supports the generation of high‐quality motion blur for point‐based objects using a piecewise linear approximation of the motion. The rendering algorithm applies ellipsoids as rendering primitives which are constructed by extending planar EWA surface splats into the temporal dimension along the instantaneous motion vector. Finally, we present an implementation of the proposed rendering algorithm with approximated occlusion handling using advanced features of modern GPUs and show its capability of producing motion‐blurred result images at interactive frame rates.     

Improved Model‐ and View‐Dependent Pruning of Large Botanical Scenes

We present an optimized pruning algorithm that allows for considerable geometry reduction in large botanical scenes while maintaining high and coherent rendering quality. We improve upon previous techniques by applying model‐specific geometry reduction functions and optimized scaling functions. For this we introduce the use of Precision and Recall (PR) as a measure of quality to rendering and show how PR‐scores can be used to predict better scaling values. We conducted a user‐study letting subjects adjust the scaling value, which shows that the predicted scaling matches the preferred ones. Finally, we extend the originally purely stochastic geometry prioritization for pruning to account for view‐optimized geometry selection, which allows to take global scene information, such as occlusion, into consideration. We demonstrate our method for the rendering of scenes with thousands of complex tree models in real‐time.     

Occlusion-Driven Scene Sorting for Efficient Culling

Image space occlusion culling is a powerful approach to reduce the rendering load of large polygonal models. However, occlusion culling is not for free; it trades overhead costs with the rendering costs of the possibly occluded geometry. Meanwhile, occlusion queries based on image space occlusion culling are supported on modern graphics hardware. However, a significant consumption of fillrate bandwidth and latency costs are associated with these queries. In this paper, we propose new techniques to reduce redundant occlusion queries. Our approach uses several "Occupancy Maps" to organize scene traversal. The respective information is accumulated efficiently by hardware‐supported asynchronous occlusion queries. To avoid redundant requests, we arrange these multiple occlusion queries according to the information of the Occupancy Maps. Our presented technique is conservative and benefits from a partial depth order of the geometry.     

3D Video Recorder: a System for Recording and Playing Free‐Viewpoint Video†

We present the 3D Video Recorder, a system capable of recording, processing, and playing three‐dimensional video from multiple points of view. We first record 2D video streams from several synchronized digital video cameras and store pre‐processed images to disk. An off‐line processing stage converts these images into a time‐varying 3D hierarchical point‐based data structure and stores this 3D video to disk. We show how we can trade‐off 3D video quality with processing performance and devise efficient compression and coding schemes for our novel 3D video representation. A typical sequence is encoded at less than 7 Mbps at a frame rate of 8.5 frames per second. The 3D video player decodes and renders 3D videos from hard‐disk in real‐time, providing interaction features known from common video cassette recorders, like variable‐speed forward and reverse, and slow motion. 3D video playback can be enhanced with novel 3D video effects such as freeze‐and‐rotate and arbitrary scaling. The player builds upon point‐based rendering techniques and is thus capable of rendering high‐quality images in real‐time. Finally, we demonstrate the 3D Video Recorder on multiple real‐life video sequences. ACM CSS: I.3.2 Computer Graphics—Graphics Systems, I.3.5 Computer Graphics—Computational Geometry and Object Modelling, I.3.7 Computer Graphics—Three‐Dimensional Graphics and Realism