Interactive Glossy Reflections using GPU-based Ray Tracing with Adaptive LOD
We present an interactive GPU-based algorithm for accurately rendering high-quality, dynamic glossy reflection effects from both HDR environment maps and local scene objects. Our method uses hardware rasterization to produce primary pixels, and GPU-based BRDF importance sampling [CK07] to quickly generate reflected rays. We utilize a fast GPU ray tracer proposed by Carr et al. [CHCH06] to compute reflection hits. Our main contribution is an adaptive level-of-detail (LOD) control algorithm that greatly improves ray tracing performance during reflection shading. Specifically, we use the solid angle represented by each reflected ray to adaptively pick the level of termination in the BVH traversal step during ray tracing. This leads to 2 ∼ 3x speedup over an unmodified implementation of [CHCH06]. Based on the same solid angle measure, we derive a texture filtering formula to reduce reflection aliasing artifacts, taking advantage of hardware MIP mapping. This extends the filtering algorithm presented in [CK07] from environment mapping to local scene reflection. Using our algorithm, we demonstrate interactive rendering rates for several scenes featuring dynamic lighting and material changes, spatially varying BRDF parameters, and rigid-body object movement.

title: Precomputed Visibility Cuts for Interactive Relighting with Dynamic BRDFs
abstract: This paper presents a novel PRT-based method that uses precomputed visibility cuts for interactive relighting with all-frequency environment maps and arbitrary dynamic BRDFs. Our method is inspired by the recent Lightcuts approach  and we parameterize distant environment lighting onto uniformly distributed sample points over the sphere. Using a binary tree structure of the points, we precompute and approximate each vertex's visibility function into clusters that we call the precomputed visibility cuts. These cuts are iteratively selected with bounded approximation error and confined cluster size. At run-time, a GPU-based relighting algorithm quickly computes the view-dependent shading color by accessing a dynamically built light tree, the precomputed visibility cuts, and a direct sampling of an arbitrary BRDF using each visibility cluster's average direction and the dynamic view direction. Compared to existing PRT techniques, our method guarantees uniform sampling of the lighting, requires no precomputed BRDF data, and can be easily extended to handle one-bounce glossy indirect transfer effects in real-time.

title: Interactive Time-Dependent Tone Mapping Using Programmable Graphics Hardware

title: Bidirectional Importance Sampling for Unstructured Direct Illumination
abstract: Recent research in bidirectional importance sampling has focused primarily on structured illumination sources such as distant environment maps, while unstructured illumination has received little attention. In this paper, we present a method for bidirectional importance sampling of unstructured illumination, allowing us to use the same method for sampling both distant as well as local/indirect sources. Building upon recent work in [WFA*05], we model complex illumination as a large set of point lights. The subsequent sampling process draws samples only from this point set. We start by constructing a piecewise constant approximation for the lighting using an illumination cut [CPWAP08]. We show that this cut can be used directly for illumination importance sampling. We then use BRDF importance sampling followed by sample counting to update the cut, resulting in a bidirectional distribution that closely approximates the product of the illumination and BRDF. Drawing visibility samples from this new distribution significantly reduces the sampling variance. As a main advance over previous work, our method allows for unstructured sources, including arbitrary local direct lighting and one-bounce of indirect lighting.

title: All-frequency interactive relighting of translucent objects with single and multiple scattering
abstract: We present a technique, based on precomputed light transport, for interactive rendering of translucent objects under all-frequency environment maps. We consider the complete BSSRDF model proposed by Jensen et al. [2001]. which includes both single and diffuse multiple scattering components. The challenge is how to efficiently precompute all-frequency light transport functions due to subsurface scattering. We apply the two-pass hierarchical technique by Jensen et al. [2002] in the space of non-linearly approximated transport vectors, which allows us to efficiently evaluate transport vectors due to diffuse multiple scattering. We then include an approximated single scattering term in the precomputation, which previous interactive systems have ignored. For an isotropic phase function, this approximation produces a diffuse transport vector per vertex, and is combined with the multiple scattering component. For a general phase function, we introduce a technique from BRDF rendering to factor the phase function using a separable decomposition to allow for view-dependent rendering. We show that our rendering results qualitatively match the appearance of translucent objects, achieving a high level of realism at interactive rates.

title: Computation on Programmable Graphics Hardware
abstract: GPUs have evolved into powerful and flexible streaming processors with fully programmable floating-point pipelines and tremendous aggregate computational power and memory bandwidth. With these advances, modern GPUs can now perform more functions than the specific graphics computations for which they were designed. This article describes approaches to using GPU processing power to accelerate traditionally CPU-based tasks. We discuss some important characteristics of algorithms that make them good candidates for GPU acceleration. We discuss a specific GPU image-processing application that is a common postprocess for many physically based rendering systems.

title: Distributive subband allocation, power and rate control for relay-assisted OFDMA cellular system with imperfect system state knowledge
abstract: In this paper, we consider distributive subband, power and rate allocation for a two-hop downlink transmission in an orthogonal frequency-division multiple-access (OFDMA) cellular system with fixed relays which operate in decode-and-forward strategy. We take into account of the penalty of packet errors due to imperfect CSIT and system fairness by considering weighted sum goodput as our optimization objective. Based on the cluster-based architecture, we obtain a fast-converging distributive solution with only local imperfect CSIT by using decomposition of the optimization problem. To further reduce the signaling overhead and computational complexity, we propose a reduced feedback distributive solution, which can achieve asymptotically optimal performance for large number of users with arbitrarily small feedback overhead per user.We also derive asymptotic average system throughput so as to obtain useful design insights.

title: Towards automatic reverse engineering of software security configurations
abstract: The specifications of an application's security configuration are crucial for understanding its security policies, which can be very helpful in security-related contexts such as misconfiguration detection. Such specifications, however, are often ill-documented, or even close because of the increasing use of graphic user interfaces to set program options. In this paper, we propose ConfigRE, a new technique for automatic reverse engineering of an application's access-control configurations. Our approach first partitions a configuration input into fields, and then identifies the semantic relations among these fields and the roles they play in enforcing an access control policy. Based upon such knowledge, ConfigRE automatically generates a specification language to describe the syntactic relations of these fields. The language can be converted into a scanner using standard parser generators for scanning configuration files and discovering the security policies specified in an application. We implemented ConfigRE in our research and evaluated it against real applications. The experiment results demonstrate the efficacy of our approach.

title: Real-time KD-tree construction on graphics hardware
abstract: We present an algorithm for constructing kd-trees on GPUs. This algorithm achieves real-time performance by exploiting the GPU's streaming architecture at all stages of kd-tree construction. Unlike previous parallel kd-tree algorithms, our method builds tree nodes completely in BFS (breadth-first search) order. We also develop a special strategy for large nodes at upper tree levels so as to further exploit the fine-grained parallelism of GPUs. For these nodes, we parallelize the computation over all geometric primitives instead of nodes at each level. Finally, in order to maintain kd-tree quality, we introduce novel schemes for fast evaluation of node split costs.
 As far as we know, ours is the first real-time kd-tree algorithm on the GPU. The kd-trees built by our algorithm are of comparable quality as those constructed by off-line CPU algorithms. In terms of speed, our algorithm is significantly faster than well-optimized single-core CPU algorithms and competitive with multi-core CPU algorithms. Our algorithm provides a general way for handling dynamic scenes on the GPU. We demonstrate the potential of our algorithm in applications involving dynamic scenes, including GPU ray tracing, interactive photon mapping, and point cloud modeling.

title: Recognizing Textual Relatedness with Predicate-Argument Structures
abstract: In this paper, we first compare several strategies to handle the newly proposed three-way Recognizing Textual Entailment (RTE) task. Then we define a new measurement for a pair of texts, called Textual Relatedness, which is a weaker concept than semantic similarity or paraphrase. We show that an alignment model based on the predicate-argument structures using this measurement can help an RTE system to recognize the Unknown cases at the first stage, and contribute to the improvement of the overall performance in the RTE task. In addition, several heterogeneous lexical resources are tested, and different contributions from them are observed.

title: An efficient GPU-based approach for interactive global illumination
abstract: This paper presents a GPU-based method for interactive global illumination that integrates complex effects such as multi-bounce indirect lighting, glossy reflections, caustics, and arbitrary specular paths. Our method builds upon scattered data sampling and interpolation on the GPU. We start with raytraced shading points and partition them into coherent shading clusters using adaptive seeding followed by k-means. At each cluster center we apply final gather to evaluate its incident irradiance using GPU-based photon mapping. We approximate the entire photon tree as a compact illumination cut, thus reducing the final gather cost for each ray. The sampled irradiance values are then interpolated at all shading points to produce rendering. Our method exploits the spatial coherence of illumination to reduce sampling cost. We sample sparsely and the distribution of sample points conforms with the underlying illumination changes. Therefore our method is both fast and preserves high rendering quality. Although the same property has been exploited by previous caching and adaptive sampling methods, these methods typically require sequential computation of sample points, making them ill-suited for the GPU. In contrast, we select sample points adaptively in a single pass, enabling parallel computation. As a result, our algorithm runs entirely on the GPU, achieving interactive rates for scenes with complex illumination effects.