Binary-space-partitioned images for resolving image-based visibility

We propose a novel 2D representation for 3D visibility sorting, the binary-space-partitioned image (BSPI), to accelerate real-time image-based rendering. BSPI is an efficient 2D realization of a 3D BSP tree, which is commonly used in computer graphics for time-critical visibility sorting. Since the overall structure of a BSP tree is encoded in a BSPI, traversing a BSPI is comparable to traversing the corresponding BSP tree. BSPI performs visibility sorting efficiently and accurately in the 2D image space by warping the reference image triangle-by-triangle instead of pixel-by-pixel. Multiple BSPIs can be combined to solve "disocclusion," when an occluded portion of the scene becomes visible at a novel viewpoint. Our method is highly automatic, including a tensor voting preprocessing step that generates candidate image partition lines for BSPIs, filters the noisy input data by rejecting outliers, and interpolates missing information. Our system has been applied to a variety of real data, including stereo, motion, and range images.     

Robust palmprint verification using 2D and 3D features

This paper presents a new personal authentication system that simultaneously exploits 2D and 3D palmprint features. The objective of our work is to improve accuracy and robustness of existing palmprint authentication systems using 3D palmprint features. The proposed multilevel framework for personal authentication efficiently utilizes the robustness (against spoof attacks) of the 3D features and the high discriminating power of the 2D features. The developed system uses an active stereo technique, structured light, to simultaneously capture 3D image or range data and a registered intensity image of the palm. The surface curvature feature based method is investigated for 3D palmprint feature extraction while Gabor feature based competitive coding scheme is used for 2D representation. We comparatively analyze these representations for their individual performance and attempt to achieve performance improvement using the proposed multilevel matcher that utilizes fixed score level combination scheme to integrate information. Our experiments on a database of 108 subjects achieved significant improvement in performance with the integration of 3D features as compared to the case when 2D palmprint features alone are employed. We also present experimental results to demonstrate that the proposed biometric system is extremely difficult to circumvent, as compared to the currently proposed palmprint authentication approaches in the literature.     

Articulated Billboards for Video‐based Rendering

We present a novel representation and rendering method for free‐viewpoint video of human characters based on multiple input video streams. The basic idea is to approximate the articulated 3D shape of the human body using a subdivision into textured billboards along the skeleton structure. Billboards are clustered to fans such that each skeleton bone contains one billboard per source camera. We call this representation articulated billboards. In the paper we describe a semi‐automatic, data‐driven algorithm to construct and render this representation, which robustly handles even challenging acquisition scenarios characterized by sparse camera positioning, inaccurate camera calibration, low video resolution, or occlusions in the scene. First, for each input view, a 2D pose estimation based on image silhouettes, motion capture data, and temporal video coherence is used to create a segmentation mask for each body part. Then, from the 2D poses and the segmentation, the actual articulated billboard model is constructed by a 3D joint optimization and compensation for camera calibration errors. The rendering method includes a novel way of blending the textural contributions of each billboard and features an adaptive seam correction to eliminate visible discontinuities between adjacent billboards textures. Our articulated billboards do not only minimize ghosting artifacts known from conventional billboard rendering, but also alleviate restrictions to the setup and sensitivities to errors of more complex 3D representations and multiview reconstruction techniques. Our results demonstrate the flexibility and the robustness of our approach with high quality free‐viewpoint video generated from broadcast footage of challenging, uncontrolled environments.     

基于全周多视角的三维重建技术

提出一种基于圆分度台的三维模型拼接技术，其核心是把双目立体测量系统安装在步进电机控制的旋转平台上，旋转拍摄多视角下的场景影像，由所记录的相应角度值，通过坐标变换将不同视角场景模型进行三维拼接．论述了旋转装置的参数标定以及同一视点下不同视角的坐标转换关系．该方法只需一次标定，自动完成测量数据的采集与拼合，非常适合于近景场景下的三维数据采集与重建．实验结果表明,系统具有较高的拼合精度．     

Registering multiple range images based on distance metric of surface-to-surface

1 Introduction In recent years, there has been growing interest in the range sensing techniques for building 3D computer models of real-world objects and scenes without requiring hu-mans to manually produce these models using laborious and error-prone CAD-based approaches. Using range sensors, users are able to capture 3D range images of objects from different viewpoints that may be combined to form the final model of the object or scene[1]. These models then may be used for a variety of app…     

Harmonic Field Based Volume Model Construction from Triangle Soup

Surface triangle meshes and volume data are two commonly used representations of digital geometry. Converting from triangle meshes to volume data is challenging, since triangle meshes often contain defects such as small holes, internal structures, or self-intersections. In the extreme case, we may be simply presented with a set of arbitrarily connected triangles, a triangle soup. This paper presents a novel method to generate volume data represented as an octree from a general 3D triangle soup. Our motivati...     

Output-sensitive 3D line integral convolution

We propose an output-sensitive visualization method for 3D line integral convolution (LIC) whose rendering speed is largely independent of the data set size and mostly governed by the complexity of the output on the image plane. Our approach of view-dependent visualization tightly links the LIC generation with the volume rendering of the LIC result in order to avoid the computation of unnecessary LIC points: early-ray termination and empty-space leaping techniques are used to skip the computation of the LIC integral in a lazy-evaluation approach; both ray casting and texture slicing can be used as volume-rendering techniques. The input noise is modeled in object space to allow for temporal coherence under object and camera motion. Different noise models are discussed, covering dense representations based on filtered white noise all the way to sparse representations similar to oriented LIC. Aliasing artifacts are avoided by frequency control over the 3D noise and by employing a 3D variant of MIPmapping. A range of illumination models is applied to the LIC streamlines: different codimension-2 lighting models and a novel gradient-based illumination model that relies on precomputed gradients and does not require any direct calculation of gradients after the LIC integral is evaluated. We discuss the issue of proper sampling of the LIC and volume-rendering integrals by employing a frequency-space analysis of the noise model and the precomputed gradients. Finally, we demonstrate that our visualization approach lends itself to a fast graphics processing unit (GPU) implementation that supports both steady and unsteady flow. Therefore, this 3D LIC method allows users to interactively explore 3D flow by means of high-quality, view-dependent, and adaptive LIC volume visualization. Applications to flow visualization in combination with feature extraction and focus-and-context visualization are described, a comparison to previous methods is provided, and a detailed performance analysis is included.     

Animated 3D Line Drawings with Temporal Coherence

Producing traditional animation is a laborious task where the key drawings are first drawn by artists and thereafter inbetween drawings are created, whether it is by hand or computer‐assisted. Auto‐inbetweening of these 2D key drawings by computer is a non‐trivial task as 3D depths are missing. An alternate approach is to generate all the drawings by extracting lines directly from animated 3D models frame by frame, concatenating and rendering them together into an animation. However, animation quality generated using this straightforward method bears two problems. Firstly, the animation contains unsatisfactory visual artifacts such as line flickering and popping. This is especially pronounced when the lines are extracted using high‐order derivatives, such as ridges and valleys, from 3D models represented in triangle meshes. Secondly, there is a lack of temporal continuity as each drawing is generated without taking its neighboring drawings into consideration. In this paper, we propose an improved approach over the straightforward method by transferring extracted 3D line drawings of each frame into individual 3D lines and processing them along the time domain. Our objective is to minimize the visual artifacts and incorporate temporal relationship of individual lines throughout the entire animation sequence. This is achieved by creating correspondent trajectory of each line from each frame and applying global optimization on each trajectory. To realize this target, we present a fully automatic novel approach, which consists of (1) a line matching algorithm, (2) an optimizing algorithm, taking into account both the variations of numbers and lengths of 3D lines in each frame, and (3) a robust tracing method for transferring collections of line segments extracted from the 3D models into individual lines. We evaluate our approach on several animated model sequences to demonstrate its effectiveness in producing line drawing animations with temporal coherence.     

小波域隐Markov交叠树模型及块效应评价

本文针对小波域隐Markov树模型(hidden Markov tree model,HMT)的块效应问题,分析了块效应的产生机理,给出了以图像去噪为基础的块效应评价准则,并提出小波域隐Markov交叠树模型(hidden Markov overlappmg tree model,HMOLT)和基于该模型的图像去噪算法。该模型通过对每个节点的数据扩展,使每个节点包括相邻的3个(1维)或9个(2维)小波系数,实现同一尺度相邻节点数据的交叠,有效地减轻HMT因树状结构而产生的块效应。实验表明,本文给出的模型和去噪算法,无论是在均方误差(MSE)、块效应指标,还是在主观视觉方面,都优于HMT和基于HMT的去噪算法。     

Novel approach to development of direct volume rendering algorithms based on visualization quality assessment

A novel approach to the development of direct volume rendering algorithms is proposed. The approach is based on the assessment of the visualization quality. Analysis of rendering artifacts and various assessment methods is done using 3D reconstructed medical tomograms as test datasets. Analysis of the previous research on methods of 3D visualization quality assessment and quality improvement is presented. 3D visualization artifacts and quality measurement method (quantitative estimation) is proposed. The method does not require any ground truth image; hence, it is a universal approach to measure the quality of the 3D-reconstruction by any ray casting technique. The method is based on generation of the reference image as a mathematical expectation for a set of 3D visualizations obtained via the jittering technique. Start position of the rays are being shifted randomly towards their directions. To estimate the deviation of a pixel value from mathematical expectation, we use PSNR metrics, which is traditional metrics in signal and image processing and measures deviation in the decibel scale. The conditions of a proper use of the technique are discussed. A new virtual samplings method with preintegration is proposed to reduce sampling artifacts in the ray casting algorithm. The novelty of the method consists in using pre-integrated classification instead of post-classification in the virtual sampling method. A novel approach to 3D visualization algorithms development based on analysis of a ray casting method in quality-performance space is demonstrated by comparing the state-of-the-art ray casting methods and the proposed method. The comparative analysis revealed an advantage of the classical pre-integrated method in the case of using trilinear filtering without local shading. It also showed the advantage of the proposed virtual sampling method with pre-integration in the case of using tricubic filtering with local lighting.     

Compression-Based 3D Texture Mapping for Real-Time Rendering

While 2D texture mapping is one of the most effective of the rendering techniques that make 3D objects appear visually interesting, it often suffers from visual artifacts produced when 2D image patterns are wrapped onto the surfaces of objects with arbitrary shapes. On the other hand, 3D texture mapping generates highly natural visual effects in which objects appear carved from lumps of materials rather than laminated with thin sheets as in 2D texture mapping. Storing 3D texture images in a table for fast mapping computations, instead of evaluating procedures on the fly, however, has been considered impractical due to the extremely high memory requirement. In this paper, we present a new effective method for 3D texture mapping designed for real-time rendering of polygonal models. Our scheme attempts to resolve the potential texture memory problem by compressing 3D textures using a wavelet-based encoding method. The experimental results on various nontrivial 3D textures and polygonal models show that high compression rates are achieved with few visual artifacts in the rendered images and a small impact on rendering time. The simplicity of our compression-based scheme will make it easy to implement practical 3D texture mapping in software/hardware rendering systems including real-time 3D graphics APIs such as OpenGL and Direct3D.     

An Objective Deghosting Quality Metric for HDR Images

Reconstructing high dynamic range (HDR) images of a complex scene involving moving objects and dynamic backgrounds is prone to artifacts. A large number of methods have been proposed that attempt to alleviate these artifacts, known as HDR deghosting algorithms. Currently, the quality of these algorithms are judged by subjective evaluations, which are tedious to conduct and get quickly outdated as new algorithms are proposed on a rapid basis. In this paper, we propose an objective metric which aims to simplify this process. Our metric takes a stack of input exposures and the deghosting result and produces a set of artifact maps for different types of artifacts. These artifact maps can be combined to yield a single quality score. We performed a subjective experiment involving 52 subjects and 16 different scenes to validate the agreement of our quality scores with subjective judgements and observed a concordance of almost 80%. Our metric also enables a novel application that we call as hybrid deghosting, in which the output of different deghosting algorithms are combined to obtain a superior deghosting result.     

Indoor Scene Reconstruction from Sets of Noisy Range Images

This paper describes a system for building 3D models of indoor scenes from sets of noisy laser range images. It addresses several important aspects of this problem, namely, preprocessing, which includes image segmentation and planar model fitting; view registration, which is the method of determining the rigid transformation that describes the relative pose of the camera platform between views; and reconstruction, which is the subsequent integration or fusion of separate range images into a single 3D model. Our proposed strategy is to use a statistical sensor model. We thus account for noise properties of the data at each stage in the reconstruction process, which produces reliable results even in the presence of significant measurement noise. We give an empirical analysis of a plane-based registration method and present results using real range data that demonstrate the performance of the entire reconstruction system.     

Folksonomies to Support Coordination and Coordination of Folksonomies

Members of highly-distributed groups in online production communities face challenges in achieving coordinated action. Existing CSCW research highlights the importance of shared language and artifacts when coordinating actions in such settings. To better understand how such shared language and artifacts are, not only a guide for, but also a result of collaborative work we examine the development of folksonomies (i.e., volunteer-generated classification schemes) to support coordinated action. Drawing on structuration theory, we conceptualize a folksonomy as an interpretive schema forming a structure of signification. Our study is set in the context of an online citizen-science project, Gravity Spy, in which volunteers label “glitches” (noise events recorded by a scientific instrument) to identify and name novel classes of glitches. Through a multi-method study combining virtual and trace ethnography, we analyze folksonomies and the work of labelling as mutually constitutive, giving folksonomies a dual role: an emergent folksonomy supports the volunteers in labelling images at the same time that the individual work of labelling images supports the development of a folksonomy. However, our analysis suggests that the lack of supporting norms and authoritative resources (structures of legitimation and domination) undermines the power of the folksonomy and so the ability of volunteers to coordinate their decisions about naming novel glitch classes. These results have implications for system design. If we hope to support the development of emergent folksonomies online production communities need to facilitate 1) tag gardening, a process of consolidating overlapping terms of artifacts; 2) demarcate a clear home for discourses around folksonomy disagreements; 3) highlight clearly when decisions have been reached; and 4) inform others about those decisions.     

On evaluating consensus in RANSAC surface registration

Random Sample Consensus is a powerful paradigm that was successfully applied in various contexts, including Location Determination Problem, fundamental matrix estimation and global 3D surface registration, where many previously proposed algorithms can be interpreted as a particular implementation of this concept. In general, a set of candidate transformations is generated by some simple procedure, and an aligning transformation is chosen within this set, such that it aligns the largest portion of the input data. We observe that choosing the aligning transformation may also be interpreted as finding consensus among the candidates, which in turn involves measuring similarity of candidate rigid transformations. While it is not difficult to construct a metric that provides reasonable results, most approaches come with certain limitations and drawbacks. In this paper, we investigate possible means of measuring distances in SE(3) and compare their properties both theoretically and experimentally in a model RANSAC registration algorithm. We also propose modifications to existing measures and propose a novel method of locating the consensus transformation based on Vantage Point Tree data structure.     

Implicit Surface-Based Geometric Fusion

This paper introduces a general purpose algorithm for reliable integration of sets of surface measurements into a single 3D model. The new algorithm constructs a single continuous implicit surface representation which is the zero-set of a scalar field function. An explicit object model is obtained using any implicit surface polygonization algorithm. Object models are reconstructed from both multiple view conventional 2.5D range images and hand-held sensor range data. To our knowledge this is the first geometric fusion algorithm capable of reconstructing 3D object models from noisy hand-held sensor range data.This approach has several important advantages over existing techniques. The implicit surface representation allows reconstruction of unknown objects of arbitrary topology and geometry. A continuous implicit surface representation enables reliable reconstruction of complex geometry. Correct integration of overlapping surface measurements in the presence of noise is achieved using geometric constraints based on measurement uncertainty. The use of measurement uncertainty ensures that the algorithm is robust to significant levels of measurement noise. Previous implicit surface-based approaches use discrete representations resulting in unreliable reconstruction for regions of high curvature or thin surface sections. Direct representation of the implicit surface boundary ensures correct reconstruction of arbitrary topology object surfaces. Fusion of overlapping measurements is performed using operations in 3D space only. This avoids the local 2D projection required for many previous methods which results in limitations on the object surface geometry that is reliably reconstructed. All previous geometric fusion algorithms developed for conventional range sensor data are based on the 2.5D image structure preventing their use for hand-held sensor data. Performance evaluation of the new integration algorithm against existing techniques demonstrates improved reconstruction of complex geometry.     

Interaction Techniques for Selecting and Manipulating Subgraphs in Network Visualizations

We present a novel and extensible set of interaction techniques for manipulating visualizations of networks by selecting subgraphs and then applying various commands to modify their layout or graphical properties. Our techniques integrate traditional rectangle and lasso selection, and also support selecting a node's neighbourhood by dragging out its radius (in edges) using a novel kind of radial menu. Commands for translation, rotation, scaling, or modifying graphical properties (such as opacity) and layout patterns can be performed by using a hotbox (a transiently popped-up, semi-transparent set of widgets) that has been extended in novel ways to integrate specification of commands with 1D or 2D arguments. Our techniques require only one mouse button and one keyboard key, and are designed for fast, gestural, in-place interaction. We present the design and integration of these interaction techniques, and illustrate their use in interactive graph visualization. Our techniques are implemented in NAViGaTOR, a software package for visualizing and analyzing biological networks. An initial usability study is also reported.     

三维AD-HOC 网络地理信息路由算法

在二维AD-HOC 网络中,可以充分利用节点的地理信息进行路由,即AD-HOC 中节点根据邻居节点的距离目标节点的距离,选择下一跳节点进行路由转发.由于AD-HOC 中节点部署通常不满足均匀分布,造成网络中出现路由空洞,贪婪转发算法在遭遇空洞的情况下将无法正确执行.在二维AD-HOC 网络环境中,往往采用贪婪(Greedy)算法结合表面路由(Face Routing)的方法跳出路由空洞.但是在三维条件下,目前没有很好跳出路由空洞的算法能够实现有效的路由.提出了一种在三维AD-HOC 网络中的地理信息路由算法GSG,该算法使用3D RDT 图和3D RRNG 图的方法实现三维网络空间的划分.采用3D 表面路由的方法进行信息传递,在遭遇局部最小点时,可有效跳出路由空洞.仿真实验结果表明,GSG 算法可提升三维AD-HOC 网络条件下地理信息路由的效率,具有良好的可扩展性.     

栅格法视觉传感集成及机器人实时避障

研究移动机器人在室内环境下集成双目视觉和激光测距仪信息进行障碍物实时检测。由双目视觉系统检测环境获取视差信息,通过直接对视差信息进行地平面拟合的方法快速检测障碍物;拟合过程中采用了随机采样一致性估计算法去除干扰点的影响,提高了障碍物检测的鲁棒性。用栅格地图表示基于机器人坐标系的地平面障碍物信息并对栅格信息进行提取,最后把双目视觉与激光测距得到的栅格信息进行集成。实验表明,通过传感信息集成,移动机器人既得到了充分的障碍物信息,又保证了检测的实时性、准确性。