No Arabic abstract
We present multispectral rendering techniques for visualizing layered materials found in biological specimens. We are the first to use acquired data from the near-infrared and ultraviolet spectra for non-photorealistic rendering (NPR). Several plant and animal species are more comprehensively understood by multispectral analysis. However, traditional NPR techniques ignore unique information outside the visible spectrum. We introduce algorithms and principles for processing wavelength dependent surface normals and reflectance. Our registration and feature detection methods are used to formulate stylization effects not considered by current NPR methods including: Spectral Band Shading which isolates and emphasizes shape features at specific wavelengths at multiple scales. Experts in our user study demonstrate the effectiveness of our system for applications in the biological sciences.
Existing online 3D shape repositories contain thousands of 3D models but lack photorealistic appearance. We present an approach to automatically assign high-quality, realistic appearance models to large scale 3D shape collections. The key idea is to jointly leverage three types of online data -- shape collections, material collections, and photo collections, using the photos as reference to guide assignment of materials to shapes. By generating a large number of synthetic renderings, we train a convolutional neural network to classify materials in real photos, and employ 3D-2D alignment techniques to transfer materials to different parts of each shape model. Our system produces photorealistic, relightable, 3D shapes (PhotoShapes).
We present a method for differentiable rendering of 3D surfaces that supports both explicit and implicit representations, provides derivatives at occlusion boundaries, and is fast and simple to implement. The method first samples the surface using non-differentiable rasterization, then applies differentiable, depth-aware point splatting to produce the final image. Our approach requires no differentiable meshing or rasterization steps, making it efficient for large 3D models and applicable to isosurfaces extracted from implicit surface definitions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for implicit-, mesh-, and parametric-surface-based inverse rendering and neural-network training applications. In particular, we show for the first time efficient, differentiable rendering of an isosurface extracted from a neural radiance field (NeRF), and demonstrate surface-based, rather than volume-based, rendering of a NeRF.
We present a technique for rendering point clouds using a neural network. Existing point rendering techniques either use splatting, or first reconstruct a surface mesh that can then be rendered. Both of these techniques require solving for global point normal orientation, which is a challenging problem on its own. Furthermore, splatting techniques result in holes and overlaps, whereas mesh reconstruction is particularly challenging, especially in the cases of thin surfaces and sheets. We cast the rendering problem as a conditional image-to-image translation problem. In our formulation, Z2P, i.e., depth-augmented point features as viewed from target camera view, are directly translated by a neural network to rendered images, conditioned on control variables (e.g., color, light). We avoid inevitable issues with splatting (i.e., holes and overlaps), and bypass solving the notoriously challenging surface reconstruction problem or estimating oriented normals. Yet, our approach results in a rendered image as if a surface mesh was reconstructed. We demonstrate that our framework produces a plausible image, and can effectively handle noise, non-uniform sampling, thin surfaces / sheets, and is fast.
Real-time rendering and animation of humans is a core function in games, movies, and telepresence applications. Existing methods have a number of drawbacks we aim to address with our work. Triangle meshes have difficulty modeling thin structures like hair, volumetric representations like Neural Volumes are too low-resolution given a reasonable memory budget, and high-resolution implicit representations like Neural Radiance Fields are too slow for use in real-time applications. We present Mixture of Volumetric Primitives (MVP), a representation for rendering dynamic 3D content that combines the completeness of volumetric representations with the efficiency of primitive-based rendering, e.g., point-based or mesh-based methods. Our approach achieves this by leveraging spatially shared computation with a deconvolutional architecture and by minimizing computation in empty regions of space with volumetric primitives that can move to cover only occupied regions. Our parameterization supports the integration of correspondence and tracking constraints, while being robust to areas where classical tracking fails, such as around thin or translucent structures and areas with large topological variability. MVP is a hybrid that generalizes both volumetric and primitive-based representations. Through a series of extensive experiments we demonstrate that it inherits the strengths of each, while avoiding many of their limitations. We also compare our approach to several state-of-the-art methods and demonstrate that MVP produces superior results in terms of quality and runtime performance.
With huge data acquisition progresses realized in the past decades and acquisition systems now able to produce high resolution grids and point clouds, the digitization of physical terrains becomes increasingly more precise. Such extreme quantities of generated and modeled data greatly impact computational performances on many levels of high-performance computing (HPC): storage media, memory requirements, transfer capability, and finally simulation interactivity, necessary to exploit this instance of big data. Efficient representations and storage are thus becoming enabling technologies in HPC experimental and simulation science. We propose HexaShrink, an original decomposition scheme for structured hexahedral volume meshes. The latter are used for instance in biomedical engineering, materials science, or geosciences. HexaShrink provides a comprehensive framework allowing efficient mesh visualization and storage. Its exactly reversible multiresolution decomposition yields a hierarchy of meshes of increasing levels of details, in terms of either geometry, continuous or categorical properties of cells. Starting with an overview of volume meshes compression techniques, our contribution blends coherently different multiresolution wavelet schemes in different dimensions. It results in a global framework preserving discontinuities (faults) across scales, implemented as a fully reversible upscaling at different resolutions. Experimental results are provided on meshes of varying size and complexity. They emphasize the consistency of the proposed representation, in terms of visualization, attribute downsampling and distribution at different resolutions. Finally, HexaShrink yields gains in storage space when combined to lossless compression techniques.