Simplified photon mapping for real-time caustics rendering

The objective of this paper is to adapt photon mapping for real-time simulation of caustics. High-performance algorithm adapted for the GPU and implemented on the basis of cross-platform OpenGL and OpenCL APIs is proposed. For effective rendering of caustics and generation of photon map OpenGL shaders are used. Voxel acceleration structure constructed directly on the GPU by means of OpenCL provides fast access to photon map. Performance estimation for different equipment is given.     

Fast real-time caustics from height fields

Caustics are crucial in water rendering, yet they are often neglected in real-time applications due to the demanding computational requirements of the general-purpose caustics computation methods. In this paper we present a two-pass algorithm for caustics computation that is extremely fast and produces high-quality results. Our algorithm is targeted for commonly used height field representations of water and a planar caustic-receiving surface. The underlying theory of our approach is presented along with implementation details and pseudo codes.     

Stylized Caustics: Progressive Rendering of Animated Caustics

In recent years, much work was devoted to the design of light editing methods such as relighting and light path editing. So far, little work addressed the target‐based manipulation and animation of caustics, for instance to a differently‐shaped caustic, text or an image. The aim of this work is the animation of caustics by blending towards a given target irradiance distribution. This enables an artist to coherently change appearance and style of caustics, e.g., for marketing applications and visual effects. Generating a smooth animation is nontrivial, as photon density and caustic structure may change significantly. Our method is based on the efficient solution of a discrete assignment problem that incorporates constraints appropriate to make intermediate blends plausibly resemble caustics. The algorithm generates temporally coherent results that are rendered with stochastic progressive photon mapping. We demonstrate our system in a number of scenes and show blends as well as a key frame animation.     

KTS: a real-time mapping algorithm for NoC-based many-cores

Many-core architectures based on network-on-chip (NoC) are scalable and have the ability to meet the increasing performance requirements of complex concurrent applications (real-time video, communications, control, etc.). This paper addresses the mapping problem of hard real-time task sets on NoC-based many-core processors. Our main contribution is a novel static mapping scheme called K-level task splitting (KTS). If a task cannot be allocated on a given core of the NoC because of a too high processing utilization ratio, it gets replicated so that its jobs execute on more than one core without migrating. Synchronization between task replicas could then be ensured by assigning offsets and virtual deadlines to them. KTS’s advantage is that data migration is not required, thus involving no overheads due to migrations. The only requirement is that all core clocks be synchronized within the NoC. In this newly proposed algorithm, the schedulability of each task is determined based upon fundamental results relative to the feasibility analysis of asynchronous real-time task sets. The paper describes the principles of task splitting, our algorithm and its properties. We evaluate the efficiency of KTS, demonstrating that it is a good compromise between existing semi-partitioned schemes (with possible migrations) and fully partitioned approaches.     

A framework for mapping periodic real-time applications onmulticomputers

This short paper presents a framework for periodic execution of task-flow graphs that enables schedulability analysis of the communication requirements. The analysis performs the steps of segmenting messages, assigning the segments to specific links and time intervals, and ordering them within the intervals to generate node switching schedules that provide contention-free message routing at run-time. The analysis is also used to integrate task allocation with message routing using a contention-based objective function. Usefulness of the proposed scheme in ensuring guaranteed communication performance is demonstrated by an appropriate example     

SHORT: Segmented histogram technique for robust real-time object recognition

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Object recognition is a broad area that covers several topics including face recognition, gesture recognition, human gait recognition, traffic road signs...     

Photon Differential Splatting for Rendering Caustics

We present a photon splatting technique which reduces noise and blur in the rendering of caustics. Blurring of illumination edges is an inherent problem in photon splatting, as each photon is unaware of its neighbours when being splatted. This means that the splat size is usually based on heuristics rather than knowledge of the local flux density. We use photon differentials to determine the size and shape of the splats such that we achieve adaptive anisotropic flux density estimation in photon splatting. As compared to previous work that uses photon differentials, we present the first method where no photons or beams or differentials need to be stored in a map. We also present improvements in the theory of photon differentials, which give more accurate results and a faster implementation. Our technique has good potential for GPU acceleration, and we limit the number of parameters requiring user adjustment to an overall smoothing parameter and the number of photons to be traced.     

Schedulability analysis and task mapping for real-time on-chip communication

Priority-based wormhole switching with a priority share policy has been proposed as a possible solution for real-time on-chip communication. However, the blocking introduced by priority share complicates the analysis process. In this paper, we propose a new “per-priority” basis analysis scheme which computes the total time window at each priority level instead of each traffic-flow. By checking the release instance of each flow at the corresponding priority window, we can determine schedulability efficiently. Building on this static analysis, for a given set of tasks and network topology, we further propose a task mapping and priority assignment algorithm, in such a way that the hard time bounds are met with a reduced hardware overhead. Experiment results show that significant resource saving can be achieved with no performance degradation in terms of missed deadlines. By using this approach, a broad class of real-time communications with different QoS requirements can be explored and developed in a SoC/NoC communication platform.     

High-quality brightness enhancement functions for real-time reverse tone mapping

This paper presents an automatic technique for producing high-quality brightness-enhancement functions for real-time reverse tone mapping of images and videos. Our approach uses a bilateral filter to obtain smooth results while preserving sharp luminance discontinuities, and can be efficiently implemented on GPUs. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by reverse tone mapping several images and videos. Experiments based on HDR visible difference predicator and on an image distortion metric indicate that the results produced by our method are less prone to visible artifacts than the ones obtained with the state-of-the-art technique for real-time automatic computation of brightness enhancement functions.     

Limited carry-in technique for real-time multi-core scheduling

Schedulability analysis has been widely studied to provide offline timing guarantees for a set of real-time tasks. The so-called limited carry-in technique, which can be orthogonally incorporated into many different multi-core schedulability analysis methods, was originally introduced for Earliest Deadline First (EDF) scheduling to derive a tighter bound on the amount of interference of carry-in jobs at the expense of investigating a pseudo-polynomial number of intervals. This technique has been later adapted for Fixed-Priority (FP) scheduling to obtain the carry-in bound efficiently by examining only one interval, leading to a significant improvement in multi-core schedulability analysis. However, such a successful result has not yet been transferred to any other non-FP scheduling algorithms. Motivated by this, this paper presents a generic limited carry-in technique that is applicable to any work-conserving algorithms. Specifically, this paper derives a carry-in bound in an algorithm-independent manner and demonstrates how to apply the bound to existing non-FP schedulability analysis methods for better schedulability.     

ZLBM: zero level binary mapping technique for video security

In recent days, providing security to data is a crucial and critical task in many image processing applications. Specifically, video security is an important and demanding concept. For this purpose, some of the embedding, encoding and decoding techniques are mentioned in existing works, but it has some drawbacks such as increased time complexity, computational complexity and memory consumption. Moreover, it does not provide high security during video transmission. To overcome all these issues, a new technique, namely, Zero Level Binary Mapping (ZLBM) is proposed in this paper for video embedding scheme. The motivation of this paper is to provide high security during video transformation by using the video steganography technique. At first, the cover and stego videos are given as the inputs and it will be converted into the video frames for further processing. Here, the Fuzzy Adaptive Median Filtering (FAMF) technique is employed to remove the impulse noise in the video frames. Then, the pixels in the filtered frames are grouped by using the block wise pixel grouping technique. After that, the frames are embedded with the help of ZLBM technique and encoded based on the patch wise code formation technique. On the receiver side, the inverse ZLBM and block wise pixel regrouping techniques are applied to get the original cover and stego videos. The novel concept of this paper is the use of ZLBM and patch wise code formation techniques for video embedding and compression. The main advantages of the proposed system are high security, good quality and reduced complexity. The experimental results evaluate the performance of the proposed video embedding technique in terms of Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), Mean Squared Error (MSE), Compression Ratio (CR), Bits Per Pixel (BPP) and Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR).     

实时立体视觉系统中的深度映射

目的 为减少立体图像中由于水平视差过大引起的视觉疲劳。针对实时渲染的立体视觉系统,给出了一种非均匀深度压缩方法。方法 该方法在单一相机空间内,通过不同的投影变换矩阵生成双眼图像,水平视差由投影变换来控制。为减少深度压缩造成的模型变形而带来的瑕疵,将不同深度区域内物体施以不同的压缩比例;将相机轴距表示为深度的连续函数,通过相机轴距推导出在单一相机空间内获取双眼图像的坐标变换,将深度压缩转换为模型的坐标变换,从而保证压缩比例的连续变化。结果 实验结果表明,该方法能有效提高立体图像的质量。结论 该方法简单、高效,可应用于游戏、虚拟现实等实时立体视觉系统。     

Manifold mapping: a two-level optimization technique

In this paper, we analyze in some detail the manifold-mapping optimization technique introduced recently [Echeverría and Hemker in space mapping and defect correction. Comput Methods Appl Math 5(2): 107—136, 2005]. Manifold mapping aims at accelerating optimal design procedures that otherwise require many evaluations of time-expensive cost functions. We give a proof of convergence for the manifold-mapping iteration. By means of two simple optimization problems we illustrate the convergence results derived. Finally, the performances of several variants of the method are compared for some design problems from electromagnetics.     

Caustic spot light for rendering caustics

It is difficult to render caustic patterns at interactive frame rates. This paper introduces new rendering techniques that relax current constraints, allowing scenes with moving, non-rigid scene objects, rigid caustic objects, and rotating directional light sources to be rendered in real-time with GPU hardware acceleration. Because our algorithm estimates the intensity and the direction of caustic light, rendering of non-Lambertian surfaces is supported. Previous caustics algorithms have separated the problem into pre-rendering and rendering phases, storing intermediate results in data structures such as photon maps or radiance transfer functions. Our central idea is to use specially parameterized spot lights, called caustic spot lights (CSLs), as the intermediate representation of a two-phase algorithm. CSLs are flexible enough that a small number can approximate the light leaving a caustic object, yet simple enough that they can be efficiently evaluated by a pixel shader program during accelerated rendering.We extend our approach to support changing lighting direction by further dividing the pre-rendering phase into per-scene and per-frame components: the per-frame phase computes frame-specific CSLs by interpolating between CSLs that were pre-computed with differing light directions.     

Storage technique for real-time streaming of layered video

Scalable streaming technology has been proposed to effectively support heterogeneous devices with dynamically varying bandwidth. From the file system’s point of view, scalable streaming introduces another dimension of complexity in disk scheduling. Most of the existing efforts on multimedia file systems are dedicated to I/O scheduling algorithm and data placement scheme that efficiently guarantee I/O bandwidth. The important underlying assumption in these efforts is that most of the multimedia file accesses are simple playback operations and therefore are sequential. However, this workload characteristic is not valid in scalable streaming environment. In a scalable streaming environment, i.e., when only a subset of imagery is retrieved, the playback does not necessarily coincide with the sequential access on the file. The current file structure and the file system organization leaves much to be desired for supporting scalable streaming service. In this work, we propose a file system scheme, Harmonic Placement to efficiently support scalable streaming. The basic idea of Harmonic placement is to cluster the frequently accessed layers together to avoid unnecessary disk seeks. The data blocks are partitioned into two sets with respect to the layers: lower layers and upper layers. In Harmonic placement, the data blocks in the lower layers are placed with respect to their frame sequence and the data blocks in the upper layers are clustered according to the layers they belong to. We develop elaborate performance models for three different file system schemes: Progressive placement, Interleaved Placement and Harmonic Placement. We investigate the performance of the file server with different file system schemes. It was found that file system performance is very sensitive to the file organization scheme. When most of the service requests are for low-quality video (e.g., 128 Kbits/s ISDN), Progressive placement scheme supports twice as many sessions as the Interleaved placement scheme. When most of the service requests are for high-quality video (e.g., 1.5 Mbits/s MPEG-2 DVD quality), Interleaved placement can support twice as many requests as Progressive placement. In both cases, Harmonic placement scheme yields the most promising performance. Primitive version of this work has appeared on Proceedings of NOSSDAV ’06, Providence, Rhode Island, USA. This work is in part funded by KOSEF throught National Research Lab (ROA-2007-000-200114-0) and by HY-SDR center at Hanyang University.     

Pi-Tag: a fast image-space marker design based on projective invariants

Visual marker systems have become an ubiquitous tool to supply a reference frame onto otherwise uncontrolled scenes. Throughout the last decades, a wide range of different approaches have emerged, each with different strengths and limitations. Some tags are optimized to reach a high accuracy in the recovered camera pose, others are based on designs that aim to maximizing the detection speed or minimizing the effect of occlusion on the detection process. Most of them, however, employ a two-step procedure where an initial homography estimation is used to translate the marker from the image plane to an orthonormal world, where it is validated and recognized. In this paper, we present a general purpose fiducial marker system that performs both steps directly in image-space. Specifically, by exploiting projective invariants such as collinearity and cross-ratios, we introduce a detection and recognition algorithm that is fast, accurate and moderately robust to occlusion. The overall performance of the system is evaluated in an extensive experimental section, where a comparison with a well-known baseline technique is presented. Additionally, several real-world applications are proposed, ranging from camera calibration to projector-based augmented reality.     

A generalized processor mapping technique for array redistribution

In many scientific applications, array redistribution is usually required to enhance data locality and reduce remote memory access in many parallel programs on distributed memory multicomputers. Since the redistribution is performed at runtime, there is a performance trade-off between the efficiency of the new data decomposition for a subsequent phase of an algorithm and the cost of redistributing data among processors. In this paper, we present a generalized processor mapping technique to minimize the amount of data exchange for BLOCK-CYCLIC(kr) to BLOCK-CYCLIC(r) array redistribution and vice versa. The main idea of the generalized processor mapping technique is first to develop mapping functions for computing a new rank of each destination processor. Based on the mapping functions, a new logical sequence of destination processors can be derived. The new logical processor sequence is then used to minimize the amount of data exchange in a redistribution. The generalized processor mapping technique can handle array redistribution with arbitrary source and destination processor sets and can be applied to multidimensional array redistribution. We present a theoretical model to analyze the performance improvement of the generalized processor mapping technique. To evaluate the performance of the proposed technique, we have implemented the generalized processor mapping technique on an IBM SP2 parallel machine. The experimental results show that the generalized processor mapping technique can provide performance improvement over a wide range of redistribution problems     

A perceptually optimized mapping technique for display images

Liquid crystal displays (LCDs) are often viewed in the energy‐saving mode or under high ambient illumination. However, both these conditions compress the tonal dynamic range of the display device, resulting in undesirable visual perception effects. In this paper, we propose a local algorithm for improving the display image quality under either of these conditions. The proposed algorithm is based on a tone mapping technique, and it reproduces the image appearance to almost its original quality with a lower dynamic range. We also develop a more accurate definition of the image distortion, which takes into account the difference in pixel values to reduce the distortion significantly. By minimizing the differences in contrast and pixel intensity between the input and output images, the algorithm preserves the contrast while simultaneously providing brightness compensation. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively maintain image quality while enabling power savings of 30%–50%.     

Remote sensing technique for mapping salt affected soils

The salt affected soils of Etah, Aligarh, Mainpuri and Mathura districts have been mapped into S1: < 10 per cent of the area covered by salts, S2: 10–30 per cent, S3: 30–50 per cent, S4: 50–75 per cent and S5: > 75 per cent using an integrated approach of image interpretation. The dull white tone of salt affected and sandy soils have posed problems in their discrimination, on TM false colour composite, however, the problem of spectral similarity was solved through integration of interpretation of thermal data (10.4–12.5μm) with TM FCC (bands 2, 3, 4) interpretation. The discrimination of salt affected soils was significantly better on data between March and first week of April because of maximum contrast. Out of l-75m ha of the total geographical area, the salt affected soils account for 11–8 per cent. Another 16–2 per cent is likely to be affected with this problem if similar degraded conditions prevail there. The values of pH: 8–7 and ECe: 1–3 dsm^-1 of S1 soils group them into non saline and mildly alkali class. Similarly low ECe: 4–4dSm^-1 and high pH: 9–8 for S3 soils and high ECe: 24–0 dsm^-1 and very high pH: 10–7 of S4/S5 soils, placed the soils into alkali and sodic classes respectively. The gypsum requirement based on pH values varies from 1 to 15 tha^-1.