Data-Driven Analysis and Synthesis of Bidirectional Texture Functions
Final Report Abstract
With increasing capabilities of rendering systems to accurately simulate the light transport, the creation of the necessary highly detailed scene descriptions has increasingly been recognized as a large challenge. One of the problems in this regard is the faithful reproduction of materials which give a surface its distinctive appearance, providing a lot of information to the observer about a materials characteristics. Bidirectional Texture Functions (BTFs), which are a data-driven representation obtained by taking images of real material sample from a large number of view and light combinations, have proven to be capable of reproducing a wide range of materials faithfully and preserving even subtle details. Prior to the onset of this project, there was already the necessary technology available for the capture, processing and rendering of BTFs which allowed for the accurate reproduction of a given material sample. However, in many cases the desired goal is not the accurate reproduction of a given sample, but instead the exploration of possible materials and the selection or design of a suitable new material for a given application. This project approached this problem by acquiring a large database of measured material samples. By applying suitable interpolation algorithms, these materials can then serve as a starting points for the user to design new materials by combining these samples. This enables an exploration of the space of materials by selecting materials with a set of desired perceptual properties and then creating a new one, which unites these properties. To enable this interpolation, we developed suitable representations which separate the measured BTFs into geometry and reflections properties. This allows for an interpolation independent from effects like parallax and shadows. Furthermore, we have developed a texture synthesis algorithm which can interpolate between textures. By combining these two techniques, it is possible to interpolate between two measured BTFs to obtain materials which are perceptually in between two input samples, both in regard to the reflection properties as well as the geometric structure. There remain several questions for further investigation. So far, we are only able to interpolate between two materials, which limits the possibilities of a designer and impedes his ability to explore the space of materials along several perceptual traits. Extending our techniques for several materials and characterizing the space spanned by these materials perceptually remain topics for further research. Similarly, performance improvements both in regard to computation time and storage space requirements and a perceptual evaluation for which material classes the developed techniques are already sufficient and for which different approaches are needed remain avenues of further research.
Publications
- Procedural editing of bidirectional texture functions.
In: J. Kautz and S. Pattanaik (eds), Eurographics Symposium on Rendering 2007. The Eurographics Association, June 2007, pp. 219-230.
Gero Müller, Ralf Sarlette, Reinhard Klein
(See online at https://dx.doi.org/10.2312/EGWR/EGSR07/219-230) - Btf compression via sparse tensor decomposition. Computer Graphics Forum, Vol. 28. 2009, Issue 4, pp. 1181–1188.
Roland Ruiters, Reinhard Klein
(See online at https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8659.2009.01495.x) - Heightfield and spatially varying brdf reconstruction for materials
with interreflections. Computer Graphics Forum (Proc. of Eurographics), Vol. 28. 2009, Issue 2, pp. 513–522.
Roland Ruiters, Reinhard Klein
(See online at https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8659.2009.01390.x) - Parallelized matrix factorization for fast btf compression.
In: Eurographics Symposium on Parallel Graphics and Visualization, 2009, pp. 25–32.
Roland Ruiters, Martin Rump, Reinhard Klein
(See online at https://dx.doi.org/10.2312/EGPGV/EGPGV09/025-032) - Patch-based texture interpolation. Computer Graphics Forum (Proc. of EGSR), Vol. 29. 2010, Issue 4, pp. 1421–1429.
Roland Ruiters, Ruwen Schnabel, Reinhard Klein
(See online at https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8659.2010.01739.x) - Capturing shape and reflectance of food. Proceedings SA '11 SIGGRAPH Asia 2011 Sketches, New York, 2011, Article No. 28.
Christopher Schwartz, Michael Weinmann, Roland Ruiters, Arno Zinke, Ralf Sarlette, Reinhard Klein
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1145/2077378.2077413) - Integrated highquality acquisition of geometry and appearance for cultural heritage. In The 12th International Symposium on Virtual Reality, Archeology and Cultural Heritage VAST 2011, pp. 25–32. Eurographics Association, October 2011.
Christopher Schwartz, Michael Weinmann, Roland Ruiters, Reinhard Klein
(See online at https://dx.doi.org/10.2312/VAST/VAST11/025-032) - Webgl-based Streaming and presentation framework for bidirectional texture functions. In: The 12th International Symposium on Virtual Reality, Archeology and Cultural Heritage VAST 2011, pages 113–120. Eurographics Association, October 2011. Best Paper Award.
Christopher Schwartz, Roland Ruiters, MichaelWeinmann, Reinhard Klein
(See online at https://dx.doi.org/10.2312/VAST/VAST11/113-120) - Data driven surface reflectance from sparse and irregular samples. Computer Graphics Forum (Proc. of Eurographics), Vol. 31. 2012, Issue 2, pp. 315-324.
Roland Ruiters, Christopher Schwartz, Reinhard Klein.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8659.2012.03010.x) - Fusing structured light consistency and helmholtz normals for 3d reconstruction. British Machine Vision Conference, September 2012, pp. 108.1--108.12.
Michael Weinmann, Roland Ruiters, Aljosa Osep, Christopher Schwartz, Reinhard Klein.
(See online at https://dx.doi.org/10.5244/C.26.108)
