Interactive stereoscopic rendering of volumetric environments

Tile Pair-Based Adaptive Multi-Rate Stereo Shading

This work proposes a new stereo shading architecture that enables adaptive shading rates and automatic shading reuse among triangles and between two views. The proposed pipeline presents several novel features. First, the present sort-middle/bin shading is extended to tile pair-based shading to rasterize and shade pixels at two views simultaneously. A new rasterization algorithm utilizing epipolar geometry is then proposed to schedule tile pairs and perform rasterization at stereo views efficiently. Second, this work presents an adaptive multi-rate shading framework to compute shading on pixels at different rates. A novel tile-based screen space cache and a new cache reuse shader are proposed to perform such multi-rate shading across triangles and views. The results show that the newly proposed method outperforms the standard sort-middle shading and the state-of-the-art multi-rate shading by achieving considerably lower shading cost and memory bandwidth.

StereoPasting: interactive composition in stereoscopic images

We propose "StereoPasting," an efficient method for depth-consistent stereoscopic composition, in which a source 2D image is interactively blended into a target stereoscopic image. As we paint "disparity" on a 2D image, the disparity map of the selected region is gradually produced by edge-aware diffusion, and then blended with that of the target stereoscopic image. By considering constraints of the expected disparities and perspective scaling, the 2D object is warped to generate an image pair, which is then blended into the target image pair to get the composition result. The warping is formulated as an energy minimization, which could be solved in real time. We also present an interactive composition system, in which users can edit the disparity maps of 2D images by strokes, while viewing the composition results instantly. Experiments show that our method is intuitive and efficient for interactive stereoscopic composition. A lot of applications demonstrate the versatility of our method.

Volume visualization: a technical overview with a focus on medical applications

With the increasing availability of high-resolution isotropic three- or four-dimensional medical datasets from sources such as magnetic resonance imaging, computed tomography, and ultrasound, volumetric image visualization techniques have increased in importance. Over the past two decades, a number of new algorithms and improvements have been developed for practical clinical image display. More recently, further efficiencies have been attained by designing and implementing volume-rendering algorithms on graphics processing units (GPUs). In this paper, we review volumetric image visualization pipelines, algorithms, and medical applications. We also illustrate our algorithm implementation and evaluation results, and address the advantages and drawbacks of each algorithm in terms of image quality and efficiency. Within the outlined literature review, we have integrated our research results relating to new visualization, classification, enhancement, and multimodal data dynamic rendering. Finally, we illustrate issues related to modern GPU working pipelines, and their applications in volume visualization domain.

Toward the light field display: autostereoscopic rendering via a cluster of projectors

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 light field that can be approximated by the light field display. The display can simultaneously provide many viewers from different viewpoints a stereoscopic effect without head tracking or special viewing glasses. This work focuses on two important technical problems related to the light field display; calibration and rendering. We present a solution to automatically calibrate the light field display using a camera and introduce two efficient algorithms to render the special multi-view images by exploiting their spatial coherence. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated with a four-projector prototype that can display dynamic imagery with full parallax.