4377482
Shell texture functions
We propose a texture function for realistic modeling and efficient rendering of materials that exhibit surface mesostructures, translucency and volumetric texture variations. The appearance of such complex materials for dynamic lighting and viewing directions is expensive to calculate and requires an impractical amount of storage to precompute. To handle this problem, our method models an object as a shell layer, formed by texture synthesis of a volumetric material sample, and a homogeneous inner core. To facilitate computation of surface radiance from the shell layer, we introduce the shell texture function (STF) which describes voxel irradiance fields based on precomputed fine-level light interactions such as shadowing by surface mesostructures and scattering of photons inside the object. Together with a diffusion approximation of homogeneous inner core radiance, the STF leads to fast and detailed raytraced renderings of complex materials.
4374799
Appearance manifolds for modeling time-variant appearance of materials
We present a visual simulation technique called appearance manifolds for modeling the time-variant surface appearance of a material from data captured at a single instant in time. In modeling time-variant appearance, our method takes advantage of the key observation that concurrent variations in appearance over a surface represent different degrees of weathering. By reorganizing these various appearances in a manner that reveals their relative order with respect to weathering degree, our method infers spatial and temporal appearance properties of the material's weathering process that can be used to convincingly generate its weathered appearance at different points in time. Results with natural non-linear reflectance variations are demonstrated in applications such as visual simulation of weathering on 3D models, increasing and decreasing the weathering of real objects, and material transfer with weathering effects.
53249335
Modeling and rendering of quasi-homogeneous materials
Many translucent materials consist of evenly-distributed heterogeneous elements which produce a complex appearance under different lighting and viewing directions. For these quasi-homogeneous materials, existing techniques do not address how to acquire their material representations from physical samples in a way that allows arbitrary geometry models to be rendered with these materials. We propose a model for such materials that can be readily acquired from physical samples. This material model can be applied to geometric models of arbitrary shapes, and the resulting objects can be efficiently rendered without expensive subsurface light transport simulation. In developing a material model with these attributes, we capitalize on a key observation about the subsurface scattering characteristics of quasi-homogeneous materials at different scales. Locally, the non-uniformity of these materials leads to inhomogeneous subsurface scattering. For subsurface scattering on a global scale, we show that a lengthy photon path through an even distribution of heterogeneous elements statistically resembles scattering in a homogeneous medium. This observation allows us to represent and measure the global light transport within quasi-homogeneous materials as well as the transfer of light into and out of a material volume through surface mesostructures. We demonstrate our technique with results for several challenging materials that exhibit sophisticated appearance features such as transmission of back illumination through surface mesostructures.
4384823
Capturing and rendering geometry details for BTF-mapped surfaces
Bidirectional texture functions, or BTFs, accurately model reflectance variation at a fine (meso-) scale as a function of lighting and viewing direction. BTFs also capture view-dependent visibility variation, also called masking or parallax, but only within surface contours. Mesostructure detail is neglected at silhouettes, so BTF-mapped objects retain the coarse shape of the underlying model.We augment BTF rendering to obtain approximate mesoscale silhouettes. Our new representation, the 4D mesostructure distance function (MDF), tabulates the displacement from a reference frame where a ray first intersects the mesoscale geometry beneath as a function of ray direction and ray position along that reference plane. Given an MDF, the mesostructure silhouette can be rendered with a per-pixel depth peeling process on graphics hardware, while shading and local parallax are handled by the BTF. Our approach allows real-time rendering, handles complex, non-height-field mesostructure, requires that no additional geometry be sent to the rasterizer other than the mesh triangles, is more compact than textured visibility representations used previously, and, for the first time, can be easily measured from physical samples. We also adapt the algorithm to capture detailed shadows cast both by and onto BTF-mapped surfaces. We demonstrate the efficiency of our algorithm on a variety of BTF data, including real data acquired using our BTF–MDF measurement system.
7700079
On 1-Arc-regular Graphs
A graph is 1-arc-regular if its full automorphism group acts regularly on the set of its arcs. In this paper, we investigate 1-arc-regular graphs of prime valency, especially of valency 3. First, we prove that if G is a soluble group then a (G, 1)-arc-regular graph must be a Cayley graph of a subgroup of G. Next we consider trivalent Cayley graphs of a finite nonabelian simple group and obtain a sufficient condition under which one can guarantee that Cay(G, S) is 1-arc-regular. Finally, as an application of the result, we construct two infinite families of 1-arc-regular trivalent Cayley graphs with insoluble automorphism groups and, in particular, one of the families is not a Cayley graph.
14844222
Summarization Design for Interactive Cross-Language Question Answering
This paper describes an experimental investigation of interactive techniques for cross-language information access. The task was to answer factual questions from a large collection of documents written in a language in which the user has little proficiency. An interactive cross-language retrieval system that included optional user-assisted query translation, display of translated summaries for individual document ranked in order of decreasing degree of match to the user's query, and optional full-text examination of individual documents was provided. Two alternative types of extractive summaries were tried using a systematically varied presentation order, one drawn from a single segment of the translated document and the other drawn from three (usually) shorter segments of the translated document. On average, users were able to correctly answer just 62% of the sixteen assigned questions in an average of 176 seconds per question. Little difference was found between the two summary types for this task in an experiment using eight human subjects. Time on task and the number of query iterations were found to exhibit a positive correlation with question difficulty.
33293924
Intelligent Object Extraction Algorithm Based on Foreground/Background Classification
In this paper, we propose an intelligent object extraction algorithm based on foreground/background classification. The proposed algorithm can offer the users more friendly interface for object extraction from image without unnecessary steps. After the interactive steps from user (marking the foreground and background parts), the wanted object is extracted from the background automatically. The proposed algorithm processes the input image by watershed to produce the regions. Then, the regions are labeled after marking parts of regions. We also introduce an implementation of hierarchical queues to store the unlabeled regions. The classification of foreground and background will generate the final image with selected object. In our experimental results, the proposed algorithm provides the output image with high efficiency. The wanted object is generated after user marking the foreground and background parts less than one second. In addition, the application of this work also can be used in image synthesis or object removal in other fields of image processing.
492137
Blind source extraction in various ill-conditioned cases
The paper discusses blind source extraction in various ill-conditioned cases based on a simple extraction network model. Extractability is first analyzed for the following ill-conditioned cases: the mixing matrix is square but-singular; the number of sensors is smaller than that of sources; the number of sensors is larger than that of sources, but the column rank of the mixing matrix is deficient; the number of sources is unknown and the column rank of the mixing matrix is deficient. A necessary and sufficient condition for extractability is obtained. A cost function and an unsupervised learning algorithm for the extraction network model are developed. Simulation results are also presented to show the validity of the theoretical results and the performance and characteristics of the learning algorithm.
2366018
Constrained texture synthesis by scalable sub-patch algorithm
In this paper, we propose a novel scalable sub-patch algorithm for texture synthesis. Texture synthesis is an important research topic in computer graphics and image processing. We present an efficient algorithm which can paste a patch each time without boundary processing technique. In particular, the proposed sub-patch algorithm can be used in constrained texture synthesis to fill the large lost region. On the other hand, the searching neighborhood pixels can be changed due to different patch size in image reconstruction. The comparison of previous algorithms is also provided in this paper. We present a first algorithm used in constrained texture synthesis by regular synthesizing order