News Release
SIGGRAPH 2005: Light Clouds, Camera Arrays and Speedier Rendering
San Diego, CA, July 28, 2005 -- Computer-graphics researchers from the Jacobs School of Engineering will be out in force at SIGGRAPH 2005. The leading annual conference and expo about computer graphics and interactive techniques takes place July 31 to August 4 at the L.A. Convention Center. This year's event will attract a broad array of attendees, including faculty and student researchers from UCSD, Calit2 and other universities, as well as industry leaders and film-makers. Only 98 research papers were selected from 461 submissions, and four of the accepted papers were authored or co-authored by researchers from Computer Science and Engineering professor Henrik Wann Jensen's Computer Graphics Lab. Jensen co-authored three of the papers, all of which will be published in the Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH 2005.
Building on their previous work to improve the lighting of translucent objects such as skin, Jensen and Ph.D. candidate Craig Donner are now tackling the diffusion of light in multi-layered translucent materials. "We are presenting a new and efficient technique to account for diffusion in thin slabs such as a leaf (pictured) where some of the light may exit the leaf rather than being completely absorbed or reflected," says Donner. "We then extended this theory and applied it to multi-layered materials such as human skin, paint or paper." Professor Jensen -- who shared an Academy Award last year for a light-diffusion technique first presented at SIGGRAPH 2001 -- also co-authored two other new papers to be presented in Los Angeles.
"Our results demonstrate real-time rendering of scenes with moving lights, dynamic cameras, glossy materials and global illumination," explains Jensen. "The system handles indirect illumination efficiently for models with more than 100,000 triangles, so our algorithm offers a practical alternative to the traditional techniques used in real-time graphics." A third paper to be presented at SIGGRAPH 2005 is titled Wavelet Importance Sampling: Efficiently Evaluating Products of Complex Functions. Jensen's co-authors are UCSD grad student Wojciech Jarosz, Lund's Akenine-Möller and Petrik Clarberg (Lund and UCSD).
One application of the new sampling technique is rendering of objects with measured BRDFs illuminated by complex distant lighting. "Our results demonstrate how the new sampling technique is more than ten times more efficient than the best previous techniques," adds Jarosz. "In contrast to previous work, our method is capable of efficiently importance sampling the product of the lighting and the BRDF."
"This changes how we think about photography," report Joshi and his co-authors. "Our goal was to explore the capabilities of an array of 100 custom video cameras that would be inexpensive to produce in the future." The research also assumes cheap and easy processing of large numbers of images, and the ability to create photographs that combine information from a number of sensed images. Members of UCSD's Computer Graphics Lab are also looking ahead to next year's SIGGRAPH. Matthias Zwicker of MIT is joining the Jacobs School as the lab's second full-time faculty member, and Zwicker is the co-author on two papers at SIGGRAPH 2005. |
Media Contacts
Doug Ramsey
Jacobs School of Engineering
858-822-5825
dramsey@ucsd.edu