August 7, 2003

CSE faculty participated in force at the 30th anniversary of SIGGRAPH (short for "Special Interest Group: Graphics"), the premier annual conference on computer graphics and interactive techniques, which took place in San Diego July 27-31. An estimated 25,000 people attended the conference or concurrent trade show at the San Diego Convention Center. Faculty organized special courses, delivered papers, showcased new graphics techniques, and showed works in the SIGGRAPH Art Gallery.

Papers
An international jury of specialists applied rigorous criteria in selecting 82 papers for presentation and publication at SIGGRAPH 2003. Apart from traditional topics, this year's papers dealt with the intersection of computer graphics and a host of other disciplines including computer vision, games, robotics and medicine.

UCSD computer science and engineering professors Serge Belongie and Henrik Wann Jensen, together with grad student Sameer Agarwal and Columbia University assistant professor of computer science Ravi Ramamoorthi, published "Structured Importance Sampling of Environment Maps" in the conference proceedings. In the paper, the authors introduce a new technique for more efficiently rendering scenes that feature distant natural illumination (see image below). Called "structured importance sampling," the technique is significantly faster than the most common sampling methods used in the computer-graphics industry today -- requiring one to two orders of magnitude fewer samples for the same image quality. The technique could speed up the work of Hollywood special-effects wizards and videogame developers.

Jensen is also the co-author of a second paper selected by the judges for publication: "Light Scattering from Human Hair Fibers." Jensen and colleagues at Stanford, Cornell and Worley Laboratories made new measurements of light scattering from individual hair fibers. Those measurements found some of the light bouncing off of the hair fibers at angles that were not consistent with today's most widely used simulation algorithms. In the paper, Jensen et. al. propose a practical shading model for hair that qualitatively matches the scattering behavior they measured - effectively producing a new model for simulating the behavior of light on hair (middle image below, compared to previous method at left and the real hair to the right).

Courses
SIGGRAPH 2003 offered a full range of half- and full-day courses designed to expose attendees to the latest trends and technologies. The 45 courses were selected from a record 111 submissions.

CSE Adjunct Professor Mike Bailey -- director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center's Design Visualization Lab -- organized and co-taught an "Introduction to Computer Graphics." The full-day course covered topics including how computer graphics works at the hardware and software levels, as well as application areas such as modeling, rendering, animation, visualization, graphics on the Web, and virtual reality.

Bailey was also one of the lecturers in a half-day course that provided an introduction to 3D layered manufacturing: "3D Hardcopy: Converting Virtual Reality to Physical Models." The course explained the processes that commercial systems use to build 3D parts, and which technologies are most appropriate for different geometries and applications. It also covered software techniques for transforming a VR model into realizable geometry, and a process plan for a layered-manufacturing system (see model of heart, upper left). Bailey runs the supercomputer center's Tele-Manufacturing Facility.

Henrik Jensen also organized a full-day course on "Monte Carlo Ray Tracing". He and five other researchers, including UC Irvine computer science professor James Arvo, gave attendees a detailed overview of the state of the art, with a focus on realistic image synthesis and global illumination (see image right). They covered topics including basic Monte Carlo integration, variance reduction techniques, path tracing and bidirectional path tracing.

Sketches & Applications
Over 170 examples of breakthrough imaging, adventurous techniques, and amazing effects were on display in roughly 40 sessions under SIGGRAPH 2003's Sketches & Applications banner. Presenters previewed their most recent achievements in animation, art, artificial intelligence, display devices, gaming, and other areas. Here again, Henrik Jensen represented UCSD and Cal-(IT)2 with a technical sketch in the Faces category called "Digital Face Cloning" (image at left). The process and the technology was used in the creation of a digital clone of a human face for a story about skin in National Geographic magazine.

UCSD computer science professor David Kriegman, was selected to show in the Textures category. His "Fast Texture Synthesis on Arbitrary Meshes" (co-authored by Sebastian Magda of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) was produced with the generation of high-quality textures on arbitrary meshes in a matter of seconds. The result of this fully automatic, user-controllable process is a mapping of every triangle in a mesh to the original texture sample - with no need for additional texture memory.

Story Adapted from Cal-(IT)2 Press Release
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