IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics

We propose an acceleration scheme for many-body dynamic collision detection at interactive rates. We use the Velocity-Aligned Discrete Oriented Polytope (VADOP), a tight bounding volume representation that offers fast update rates and which is particularly suitable for applications with many fast-moving objects. The axes selection that determines the shape of our bounding volumes is based on spher... View full abstract»

Photon mapping places an enormous burden on the memory hierarchy. Rendering a 512 x 512 image of a simple scene can require more than 196 Gbytes of raw bandwidth to the photon map data structure. This bandwidth is a major obstacle to real-time photon mapping. This paper investigates two approaches for reducing the required bandwidth: 1) reordering the kNN searches and 2) cache conscious dat... View full abstract»

Stretch-free surface flattening has been requested by a variety of applications. At present, the most difficult problem is how to segment a given model into nearly developable atlases so that a nearly stretch-free flattening can be computed. The criterion for segmentation is needed to evaluate the possibility of flattening a given surface patch, which should be fast computed. In this paper, we pre... View full abstract»

Providing appropriate methods to facilitate the analysis of time-oriented data is a key issue in many application domains. In this paper, we focus on the unique role of the parameter time in the context of visually driven data analysis. We will discuss three major aspects - visualization, analysis, and the user. It will be illustrated that it is necessary to consider the characteristics of time wh... View full abstract»

We propose a novel approach to proportional derivative (PD) control exploiting the fact that these equations can be solved analytically for a single degree of freedom. The analytic solution indicates what the PD controller would accomplish in isolation without interference from neighboring joints, gravity and external forces, outboard limbs, etc. Our approach to time integration includes an invers... View full abstract»

Information uncertainty is inherent in many problems and is often subtle and complicated to understand. Although visualization is a powerful means for exploring and understanding information, information uncertainty visualization is ad hoc and not widespread. This paper identifies two main barriers to the uptake of information uncertainty visualization: first, the difficulty of modeling and propag... View full abstract»

This paper presents the layer-based representation of polyhedrons and its use for point-in-polyhedron tests. In the representation, the facets and edges of a polyhedron are sequentially arranged, and so, the binary search algorithm is efficiently used to speed up inclusion tests. In comparison with conventional representation for polyhedrons, the layer-based representation that we propose greatly ... View full abstract»

Ultimately, a display device should be capable of reproducing the visual effects observed in reality. In this paper, we introduce an autostereoscopic display that uses a scalable array of digital light projectors and a projection screen augmented with microlenses to simulate a light field for a given three-dimensional scene. Physical objects emit or reflect light in all directions to create a ligh... View full abstract»

Recent radiometric compensation techniques make it possible to project images onto colored and textured surfaces. This is realized with projector-camera systems by scanning the projection surface on a per-pixel basis. Using the captured information, a compensation image is calculated that neutralizes geometric distortions and color blending caused by the underlying surface. As a result, the bright... View full abstract»

Curved Planar Reformation (CPR) has proved to be a practical and widely used tool for the visualization of curved tubular structures within the human body. It has been useful in medical procedures involving the examination of blood vessels and the spine. However, it is more difficult to use it for large, tubular, structures such as the trachea and the colon because abnormalities may be smaller rel... View full abstract»

Information visualization (InfoVis) is now an accepted and growing field, but questions remain about the best uses for and the maturity of novel visualizations. Usability studies and controlled experiments are helpful, but generalization is difficult. We believe that the systematic development of benchmarks will facilitate the comparison of techniques and help identify their strengths under differ... View full abstract»

Clip art is a simplified illustration form consisting of layered filled polygons or closed curves used to convey 3D shape information in a 2D vector graphics format. This paper focuses on the problem of direct conversion of smooth surfaces, ranging from the free-form shapes of art and design to the mathematical structures of geometry and topology, into a clip art form suitable for illustration use... View full abstract»

We use our hands to manipulate objects in our daily life. The hand is capable of accomplishing diverse tasks such as pointing, gripping, twisting, and tearing. However, there is not much work that considers using the hand as input in distributed virtual environments (DVEs), in particular, over the Internet. The main reasons are that the Internet suffers from high network latency, which affects int... View full abstract»

In this paper, we describe a novel 3D subdivision strategy to extract the surface of binary image data. This iterative approach generates a series of surface meshes that capture different levels of detail of the underlying structure. At the highest level of detail, the resulting surface mesh generated by our approach uses only about 10 percent of the triangles in comparison to the Marching Cube (M... View full abstract»

We present a psychology-inspired approach for generating a character's anticipation of and response to an impending head or upper body impact. Protective anticipatory movement is built upon several actions that have been identified in the psychology literature as response mechanisms in monkeys and in humans. These actions are parameterized by a model of the approaching object (the threat) and are ... View full abstract»

Visual data comprise of multiscale and inhomogeneous signals. In this paper, we exploit these characteristics and develop a compact data representation technique based on a hierarchical tensor-based transformation. In this technique, an original multidimensional data set is transformed into a hierarchy of signals to expose its multiscale structures. The signal at each level of the hierarchy is fur... View full abstract»

This paper presents a sharpness-based method for hole-filling that can repair a 3D model such that its shape conforms to that of the original model. The method involves two processes: interpolation-based hole-filling, which produces an initial repaired model, and postprocessing, which adjusts the shape of the initial repaired model to conform to that of the original model. In the interpolation-bas... View full abstract»

This survey reviews the recent advances in linear variational mesh deformation techniques. These methods were developed for editing detailed high-resolution meshes like those produced by scanning real-world objects. The challenge of manipulating such complex surfaces is threefold: The deformation technique has to be sufficiently fast, robust, intuitive, and easy to control to be useful for interac... View full abstract»

Two methods have been used extensively to model resting contact for rigid-body simulation. The first approach, the penalty method, applies virtual springs to surfaces in contact to minimize interpenetration. This method, as typically implemented, results in oscillatory behavior and considerable penetration. The second approach, based on formulating resting contact as a linear complementa... View full abstract»