Creating photorealistic images has always been an essential goal in computer graphics. The image generation process builds on a complex mathematical construct, the so-called rendering equation. This equation defines how light interacts with surfaces in a virtual scene, and involves complex surface description models that describe important effects like reflections, glossy surface interactions, and indirect illumination. Solving this equation can be achieved by investing a large amount of time and computational resources, but intelligent methods have been found that greatly speed up the calculations up to an interactive or even real-time frame rates. Both interactive as well as any non-interactive applications such as computer games, visual effects, architectural lighting simulation, urban and automotive design, disaster simulation and many other applications that depend on an accurate light simulation, profit from efficient ways to calculate light transport. These methods can be categorized by being a part of the mathematical field of functional analysis where a large body of research exists because it forms the basis for scientific fields such as quantum mechanics, chaos and ergodic theory, vision and signal processing besides countless specialized applications in areas like structural mechanics, simulation and other engineering problems. Applications of Fourier or Laplace transformations, Spherical Harmonics or Wavelets, just to name a few important approaches, are ubiquitous. However, despite the considerable amount of research work devoted to finding methods to calculate and analyze the complex light transport in a virtual scene, they remain challenging issues and many inherent properties of light transport are largely unknown. Over the course of the last 10 years, a more general form of wavelets, named anisotropic wavelets that introduce directionality to the basis definitions have been proposed. In particular, curvelets and contourlets have already proven to be powerful tools in astrophysics, seismology, fluid dynamics and vision due to their unique properties optimized for natural signals. Yet, anisotropic wavelets have not been considered for light transport, though they have several advantages over standard wavelets such as a higher sparsity or near-optimal representation. Therefore, the main goal of this project is to develop methods based on anisotropic wavelets that calculate all aspects of light transport more efficiently, delivering a higher image quality with fewer resources, including an adaptation to all principal domains used in computer graphics. Due to their properties, anisotropic wavelets also form an excellent foundation to perform a fundamental multi-scale and multi-directional analysis of light transport which leads to a better understanding and deeper into the process of light transport in virtual scenes.

Funding

  • FWF P23700-N23

Research Areas

  • In this area, we concentrate on algorithms that synthesize images to depict 3D models or scenes, often by simulating or approximating the physics of light.

Publications

14 Publications found:
Image Bib Reference Publication Type
2016
Karoly Zsolnai-FehérORCID iD
Real-time Subsurface Scattering, Light Transport and Two Minute Papers, 2016, Intel Advanced Rendering Technology group
Invited Talk
2015
Jorge Jimenez, Karoly Zsolnai-FehérORCID iD, Adrian Jarabo, Christian Freude, Thomas Auzinger, Xian-Chun Wu, Javier van der Pahlen, Michael WimmerORCID iD, Diego Gutierrez
Separable Subsurface Scattering
Computer Graphics Forum, 34(6):188-197, June 2015. [paper]
Journal Paper with Conference Talk
Thomas Auzinger
Prefiltered Anti-Aliasing on Parallel Hardware, 2015, IST Austria
Invited Talk
2014
Karoly Zsolnai-FehérORCID iD
Light Transport with a Touch of Fluids, 21. October 2014,
Invited Talk
Matthias Bernhard, Efstathios Stavrakis, Michael Hecher, Michael WimmerORCID iD
Gaze-To-Object Mapping During Visual Search in 3D Virtual Environments
ACM Transactions on Applied Perception (Special Issue SAP 2014), 11(3):14:1-14:17, August 2014. [draft] [video]
Journal Paper with Conference Talk
Michael Hecher, Matthias Bernhard, Oliver Mattausch, Daniel Scherzer, Michael WimmerORCID iD
A Comparative Perceptual Study of Soft Shadow Algorithms
ACM Transactions on Applied Perception, 11(5):5:1-5:21, June 2014.
Journal Paper (without talk)
Silvana Podaras
Automated Lighting Design For Photorealistic Rendering
[paper]
Bachelor Thesis
Thomas Auzinger
Analytic Rasterization, 30. April 2014, Czech Technical University in Prague, Department of Computer Graphics and Interaction, Prague
Invited Talk
Thomas Auzinger
GPGPU in Graphics and Visualization, 15. October 2014, Universidad de Jaén, Spain
Invited Talk
image Sebastian Sippl
Framework for Shape Segmentation
Student Project
2013
Thomas Auzinger, Michael WimmerORCID iD
Sampled and Analytic Rasterization
Poster shown at VMV 2013 (11. September 2013-13. September 2013) In Proceedings of the 18th International Workshop on Vision, Modeling and Visualization , pages 223-224.
[Poster]
Poster
Thomas Auzinger, Przemyslaw Musialski, Reinhold PreinerORCID iD, Michael WimmerORCID iD
Non-Sampled Anti-Aliasing
In Proceedings of the 18th International Workshop on Vision, Modeling and Visualization (VMV 2013), pages 169-176. September 2013.
[Paper]
Conference Paper
Christian Luksch, Robert F. Tobler, Ralf Habel, Michael Schwärzler, Michael WimmerORCID iD
Fast Light-Map Computation with Virtual Polygon Lights
In Proceedings of ACM Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games 2013, pages 87-94. March 2013.
[draft]
Conference Paper
2012
Practical Spectral Photography Ralf Habel, Michael Kudenov, Michael WimmerORCID iD
Practical Spectral Photography
Computer Graphics Forum (Proceedings EUROGRAPHICS 2012), 31(2):449-458, May 2012. [Draft]
Journal Paper with Conference Talk
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