Real-time soft shadows in dynamic scenes using spherical harmonic exponentiation
Previous methods for soft shadows numerically integrate over many light directions at each receiver point, testing blocker visibility in each direction. We introduce a method for real-time soft shadows in dynamic scenes illuminated by large, low-frequency light sources where such integration is impractical. Our method operates on vectors representing low-frequency visibility of blockers in the spherical harmonic basis. Blocking geometry is modeled as a set of spheres; relatively few spheres capture the low-frequency blocking effect of complicated geometry. At each receiver point, we compute the product of visibility vectors for these blocker spheres as seen from the point. Instead of computing an expensive SH product per blocker as in previous work, we perform inexpensive vector sums to accumulate the log of blocker visibility. SH exponentiation then yields the product visibility vector over all blockers. We show how the SH exponentiation required can be approximated accurately and efficiently for low-order SH, accelerating previous CPU-based methods by a factor of 10 or more, depending on blocker complexity, and allowing real-time GPU implementation.

title: Variational sphere set approximation for solid objects
abstract: We approximate a solid object represented as a triangle mesh by a bounding set of spheres having minimal summed volume outside the object. We show how outside volume for a single sphere can be computed using a simple integration over the object’s triangles. We then minimize the total outside volume over all spheres in the set using a variant of iterative Lloyd clustering that splits the mesh points into sets and bounds each with an outside volume-minimizing sphere. The resulting sphere sets are tighter than those of previous methods. In experiments comparing against a state-of-the-art alternative (adaptive medial axis), our method often requires half as many spheres, or fewer, to obtain the same error, under a variety of error metrics including total outside volume, shadowing fidelity, and proximity measurement.

title: Fast, Sub-pixel Antialiased Shadow Maps
abstract: Solving aliasing artifacts is an essential problem in shadow mapping approaches. Many works have been proposed, however, most of them focused on removing the texel-level aliasing that results from the limited resolution of shadow maps. Little work has been done to solve the pixel-level shadow aliasing that is produced by the rasterization on the screen plane. In this paper, we propose a fast, sub-pixel antialiased shadowing algorithm to solve the pixel aliasing problem. Our work is based on the alias-free shadow maps, which is capable of computing accurate per-pixel shadow, and only incurs little cost to extend to sub-pixel accuracy. Instead of direct supersampling the screen space, we take facets to approximate pixels in shadow testing. The shadowed area of one facet is rapidly evaluated by projecting blocker geometry onto a supersampled 2D occlusion mask with bitmasks fusion. It provides a sub-pixel occlusion sampling so as to capture fine shadow details and features. Furthermore, we introduce the silhouette mask map that limits visibility evaluation to pixels only on the silhouette, which greatly reduces the computation cost. Our algorithm runs entirely on the GPU, achieving real-time performance and is an order of magnitude faster than the brute-force supersampling method to produce comparable 32× antialiased shadows.

title: Precomputed Radiance Transfer Field for Rendering Interreflections in Dynamic Scenes
abstract: In this paper, we introduce a new representation – radiance transfer fields (RTF) – for rendering interreflections in dynamic scenes under low frequency illumination. The RTF describes the radiance transferred by an individual object to its surrounding space as a function of the incident radiance. An important property of RTF is its independence of the scene configuration, enabling interreflection computation in dynamic scenes. Secondly, RTFs naturally fit in with the rendering framework of precomputed shadow fields, incurring negligible cost to add interreflection effects. In addition, RTFs can be used to compute interreflections for both diffuse and glossy objects. We also show that RTF data can be highly compressed by clustered principal component analysis (CPCA), which not only reduces the memory cost but also accelerates rendering. Finally, we present some experimental results demonstrating our techniques.

title: Synthesizing trees by plantons
abstract: In this paper, we present a two-level statistical model for characterizing the stochastic and specific nature of trees. At the low level, we define plantons, which are a group of similar organs, to depict tree organ details statistically. At the high level, a set of transitions between plantons is provided to describe the stochastic distribution of organs.Based on such a tree model, we propose a novel tree modeling approach, synthesizing trees by plantons, which are extracted from tree samples. All tree samples are captured from the real world. We have designed a maximum likelihood estimation algorithm to acquire the two-level statistical tree model from single samples or multi- samples. Experimental results show that our new model is capable of synthesizing new trees with similar, yet visually different shapes.

title: Perceptually-motivated shape exaggeration
abstract: Image communication would appear more efficient if the visual cases of the concerned parts can be enhanced. One way to achieve this is by local shape exaggeration in rendering. In this paper, we present an interactive scheme for controllable local shape exaggeration. Our approach achieves local, direct, and consistent appearance enhancement by modifying the surface orientation in an intuitive and globally optimized manner with sparse user-specified constraints. Compared with previous approaches, the main contribution of this paper is the introduction of adaptive exaggeration function (AEF), which is capable of modulating the extent of detail enhancement to obtain a satisfactory shape exaggeration result. The AEF model is derived based on a series of experiments. We complement our new approach with a variety of examples, user studies, and provide comparisons with recent approaches.

title: Optimal gossiping in square 2D meshes
abstract: Gossiping is the communication problem in which each node has a unique message to be transmitted to every other node. The nodes exchange their message by packets. A solution to the problem is judged by how many rounds of packet sending it requires. In this paper, we consider the version of the problem in which small-size packets each carrying exactly one message are used. The nodes of the target meshes are assumed to be all-port (a node's incident edges can all be active at the same time); and their edges are either half-duplex or full-duplex, which are also known as the H* model and the F* model, respectively. We study the class of 2D square meshes. Soch and Tvrdik (SIROCCO'97, pp. 253-265; Tech. rep. DC-97-04, Dept. of CS&E, Czech Technical University) have obtained optimal algorithms for the F* model (for square or nonsquare meshes). Lau and Zhang ( (4) (2002) 349-358) have obtained fast algorithms for the H* model. We present optimal algorithms for both models, with the interesting property that they route their messages along the same paths and in the same order, i.e. for any edge {u,v}, the i-th message from u to v under either model is the same message.

title: Context-Centric Needs Anticipation Using Information Needs Graphs
abstract: Effective agent teamwork requires information exchange to be conducted in a proactive, selective, and intelligent way. In the field of distributed artificial intelligence, there has been increasing number of research focusing on need-driven proactive communication, both theoretically and practically. Among these works, CAST has realized a team-oriented agent architecture where agents, based on a computational shared mental model, are able to anticipate teammates' information needs and proactively deliver relevant information to the needers in a timely manner. However, the first implementation of CAST takes little consideration of the dynamics of the anticipated information needs, which can change in various ways as the context develops. In this paper we describe a novel mechanism for organizing and managing the “context” of information needs. This allows agents to dynamically activate and deactivate information needs progressively. It has been shown that the two-level context-centric approach can enhance team performance considerably.

title: Side-Channel Leaks in Web Applications: A Reality Today, a Challenge Tomorrow
abstract: With software-as-a-service becoming mainstream, more and more applications are delivered to the client through the Web. Unlike a desktop application, a web application is split into browser-side and server-side components. A subset of the application’s internal information flows are inevitably exposed on the network. We show that despite encryption, such a side-channel information leak is a realistic and serious threat to user privacy. Specifically, we found that surprisingly detailed sensitive information is being leaked out from a number of high-profile, top-of-the-line web applications in healthcare, taxation, investment and web search: an eavesdropper can infer the illnesses/medications/surgeries of the user, her family income and investment secrets, despite HTTPS protection; a stranger on the street can glean enterprise employees' web search queries, despite WPA/WPA2 Wi-Fi encryption. More importantly, the root causes of the problem are some fundamental characteristics of web applications: stateful communication, low entropy input for better interaction, and significant traffic distinctions. As a result, the scope of the problem seems industry-wide. We further present a concrete analysis to demonstrate the challenges of mitigating such a threat, which points to the necessity of a disciplined engineering practice for side-channel mitigations in future web application developments.

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: All-frequency relighting of glossy objects
abstract: We present a technique for interactive rendering of glossy objects in complex and dynamic lighting environments that captures interreflections and all-frequency shadows. Our system is based on precomputed radiance transfer and separable BRDF approximation. We factor glossy BRDFs using a separable decomposition and keep only a few low-order approximation terms, each consisting of a purely view-dependent and a purely light-dependent component. In the precomputation step, for every vertex, we sample its visibility and compute a direct illumination transport vector corresponding to each BRDF term. We use modern graphics hardware to accelerate this step and further compress the data using a nonlinear wavelet approximation. The direct illumination pass is followed by one or more interreflection passes, each of which gathers compressed transport vectors from the previous pass to produce global illumination transport vectors. To render at run time, we dynamically sample the lighting to produce a light vector, also represented in a wavelet basis. We compute the inner product of the light vector with the precomputed transport vectors, and the results are further combined with the BRDF view-dependent components to produce vertex colors. We describe acceleration of the rendering algorithm using programmable graphics hardware and discuss the limitations and trade-offs imposed by the hardware.