Bidirectional Importance Sampling for Unstructured Direct Illumination
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: Interactive Time-Dependent Tone Mapping Using Programmable Graphics Hardware

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: 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.

title: Efficient reconstruction of indoor scenes with color
abstract: We present an efficient and general approach to computing and integrating 3D distance fields directly from multiple range images. We compute normal and confidence values directly from a 2D range image. We then approximate 3D Euclidean distance by correcting the line-of-sight distance. To integrate multiple scans, we efficiently transform voxels of the target distance field to each scan's local coordinate system, then update voxels with computed distance and confidence values. Finally, we extract an iso-surface from the weighted distance field using the marching cubes algorithm. We extend the same idea to the assignment of weighted colors or texture coordinates to the reconstructed model. Experiments show that our approach is fast, has reasonable storage requirements, and can produce high-quality surfaces from multiple range scans.

title: Real-time soft shadows in dynamic scenes using spherical harmonic exponentiation
abstract: 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: 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.

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: Outdoor Face Recognition Using Enhanced Near Infrared Imaging
abstract: In this paper, we present a robust and accurate system for outdoor (as well as indoor) face recognition, based on a recently developed enhanced near-infrared (ENIR) imaging device. Using a narrow band NIR laser generator instead of LED lights for active frontal illumination, the ENIR device can provide face images of good quality even under sunlight. Experiments show that the ENIR system performs similarly to the existing NIR system when used indoors, but outperforms it significantly outdoors especially under sunlight.

title: A Cognitive Study on the Effectiveness of an Augmented Virtuality-Based Collaborative Design Space
abstract: This paper presents one empirical study on an Augmented Virtuality (AV)-based virtual environment dedicated for remote collaboration. This AV-based system enables a remote designer to explore a virtual counterpart of a remote built environment that needs to be re-designed. Results of the study demonstrate that the AV system is effective and achieves good overall satisfaction, but involves some issues. Results also reveals that the participants all gain a similar sense in the AV environment as experienced in the real space.