8122062
High quality splatting and volume synthesis
Our recent improvements to volume rendering using splatting allow for an accurate functional reconstruction and volume integration, occlusion-based acceleration, post-rendering classification and shading, 3D texture mapping, bump mapping, anti-aliasing and gaseous animation. A pure software implementation requiring low storage and using simple operations has been implemented to easily support these operations. This paper presents a unified framework and discussion of these enhancements, as well as extensions to support hypertextures efficiently. Discussions on appropriate volume models for effective usage of these techniques is also presented.
17763521
High-Quality Splatting on Rectilinear Grids with Efficient Culling of Occluded Voxels
Splatting is a popular volume rendering algorithm that pairs good image quality with an efficient volume projection scheme. The current axis-aligned sheet-buffer approach, however, bears certain inaccuracies. The effect of these is less noticeable in still images, but clearly revealed in animated viewing, where disturbing popping of object brightness occurs at certain view angle transitions. In previous work, we presented a new variant of sheet-buffered splatting in which the compositing sheets are oriented parallel to the image plane. This scheme not only eliminates the condition for popping, but also produces images of higher quality. In this paper, we summarize this new paradigm and extend it in a number of ways. We devise a new solution to render rectilinear grids of equivalent cost to the traditional approach that treats the anisotropic volume as being warped into a cubic grid. This enables us to use the usual radially symmetric kernels, which can be projected without inaccuracies. Next, current splatting approaches necessitate the projection of all voxels in the iso-interval(s), although only a subset of these voxels may eventually be visible in the final image. To eliminate these wasteful computations we propose a novel front-to-back approach that employs an occlusion map to determine if a splat contributes to the image before it is projected, thus skipping occluded splats. Additional measures are presented for further speedups. In addition, we present an efficient list-based volume traversal scheme that facilitates the quick modification of transfer functions and iso-values.
1676234
A complete distance field representation
Distance fields are an important volume representation. A high quality distance field facilitates accurate surface characterization and gradient estimation. However, due to Nyquist's law, no existing volumetric methods based on the linear sampling theory can fully capture surface details, such as comers and edges, in 3D space. We propose a novel complete distance field representation (CDFR) that does not rely on Nyquist's sampling theory. To accomplish this, we construct a volume where each voxel has a complete description of all portions of surface that affect the local distance field. For any desired distance, we are able to extract a surface contour in true Euclidean distance, at any level of accuracy, from the same CDFR representation. Such point-based iso-distance contours have faithful per-point gradients and can be interactively visualized using splatting, providing per-point shaded image quality. We also demonstrate applying CDFR to a cutting edge design for manufacturing application involving high-complexity parts at unprecedented accuracy using only commonly available computational resources.
14767737
Dynamic co-scheduling of distributed computation and replication
We are interested in developing the infrastructural tools that allow a distributed data intensive computing environment to be shared by a group of collaborating but geographically separated researchers in an interactive manner, as opposed to a batch mode of operation. However, without advanced reservation, it is difficult to assure a certain level of performance on a large number of shared and heterogeneous servers. To achieve scalable parallel speedups in this scenario, we must closely integrate the management of computation and runtime data movement. In this paper, we first define the canonical scheduling problem for datasets distributed with k-way replication in the wide area. We then develop a dynamic co-scheduling algorithm that integrates the scheduling of computation and data movement. Using time-varying visualization as the driving application, we demonstrate that our co-scheduling approach improves not only application performance but also server utilization at a very reasonable cost.
36043890
Remote Visualization by Browsing Image Based Databases with Logistical Networking
4333882
Linear-Time Representation Algorithms for Proper Circular-Arc Graphs and Proper Interval Graphs
Our main result is a linear-time (that is, time $O(m+n)$) algorithm to recognize and represent proper circular-arc graphs. The best previous algorithm, due to A. Tucker, has time complexity $O(n^2)$. We take advantage of the fact that (among connected graphs) proper circular-arc graphs are precisely the graphs orientable as local tournaments, and we use a new characterization of local tournaments. The algorithm depends on repeated representation of portions of the input graph as proper interval graphs. Thus we also find it useful to give a new linear-time algorithm to represent proper interval graphs. This latter algorithm also depends on an orientation characterization of proper interval graphs. It is conceptually simple and does not use complex data structures. As a byproduct of the correctness proof of the algorithm, we also obtain a new proof of a characterization of proper interval graphs by forbidden subgraphs.
4388882
Interval bigraphs and circular arc graphs
9961789
Interactively visualizing procedurally encoded scalar fields
While interactive visualization of rectilinear gridded volume data sets can now be accomplished using texture mapping hardware on commodity PCs, interactive rendering and exploration of large scattered or unstructured data sets is still a challenging problem. We have developed a new approach that allows the interactive rendering and navigation of procedurally-encoded 3D scalar fields by reconstructing these fields on PC class graphics processing units. Since the radial basis functions (RBFs) we use for encoding can provide a compact representation of volumetric scalar fields, the large grid/mesh traditionally needed for rendering is no longer required and ceases to be a data transfer and computational bottleneck during rendering. Our new approach will interactively render RBF encoded data obtained from arbitrary volume data sets, including both structured volume models and unstructured scattered volume models. This procedural reconstruction of large data sets is flexible, extensible, and can take advantage of the Moore's Law cubed increase in performance of graphics hardware.
474823
Boosting the Feature Space: Text Classification for Unstructured Data on the Web
The issue of seeking efficient and effective methods for classifying unstructured text in large document corpora has received much attention in recent years. Traditional document representation like bag-of-words encodes documents as feature vectors, which usually leads to sparse feature spaces with large dimensionality, thus making it hard to achieve high classification accuracies. This paper addresses the problem of classifying unstructured documents on the Web. A classification approach is proposed that utilizes traditional feature reduction techniques along with a collaborative filtering method for augmenting document feature spaces. The method produces feature spaces with an order of magnitude less features compared with a baseline bag-of-words feature selection method. Experiments on both real-world data and benchmark corpus indicate that our approach improves classification accuracy over the traditional methods for both support vector machines and AdaBoost classifiers.
4790911
Spanning k-arc-strong subdigraphs with few arcs in k-arc-strong tournaments
Given a k-arc-strong tournament T , we estimate the minimum number of arcs possible in a k-arc-strong spanning subdigraph of T . We give a construction which shows that for each k ≥ 2 there are tournaments T on n vertices such that every k-arc-strong spanning subdigraph of T contains at least nk+ k(k−1) 2 arcs. In fact, the tournaments in our construction have the property that every spanning subdigraph with minimum inand out-degree at least k has nk + k(k−1) 2 arcs. This is best possible since it can be shown that every k-arc-strong tournament contains a spanning subdigraph with minimum inand out-degree at least k and no more than nk + k(k−1) 2 arcs. As our main result we prove that every k-arcstrong tournament contains a spanning k-arc-strong subdigraph with no more than nk + 280k2 arcs. We conjecture that for every k-arc-strong tournament T , the minimum number of arcs in a k-arc-strong spanning subdigraph of T is equal to the minimum number of arcs in a spanning subdigraph of T with the property that every vertex has inand out-degree at least k. We also discuss the implications of our results on related problems and conjectures.