Graphics Paper Roundup

All of these papers except the Larrabee paper were found on Ke-Sen Huang’s list of recent graphics conference papers. Fantastic site, well worth a browse.

Larrabee: A Many Core Architecture for Visual Computing – Larrabee is huge. If they can deliver, Intel is going to go from laughing stock to dominant force in the GPU industry. In five years, every CPU will have the capability to run Renderman in realtime. GPU manufacturers are running into a wall as they try to implement fast general processing. Intel has the expertise and muscle to pull off a massively parallel general rendering architecture and get it into the marketplace.
Lapped Solid Textures – A mechanism for texturing a whole solid object, not just the surface. The best example from their talk is a kiwi – it has skin on the outside and all the right striations and chunks inside. The artist provides a small exemplar 3d texture, and uses the interactive editor to indicate how the object should be textured. The tool does the rest. Very cool, especially when you start thinking about breakable objects.
Shading-Based Surface Editing – The authors present another image based mesh editing technique. In other words, you scribble on the shape in 2d and it affects the geometry of the mesh. This one is based on you sketching shading onto a surface to affect its contour – draw a shadow and you get an appropriate shaped bump.
Interactive Procedural Street Modeling – Latest greatest procedural city tech. The video is a lot of fun, especially with the flythrough at the end. I keep waiting for Introversion to release that game they posted screenshots of with the procedural city.
Improved Seam Carving for Video Retargeting – You remember that cool seam-based image resizing stuff that came around about a year ago? These guys extended it to video, and also revised the decimation metric to give better and more consistent results.
CHC++: Coherent Hierarchical Occlusion Culling Revisited – Pretty cool hierarchical occlusion technique. Hardware and the algorithms are finally getting good enough that occlusion queries seem to be a viable technique. I’d love to try this out in Blockland, which would benefit quite a bit from a good occlusion system.
Statistical Reconstruction and Animation of Specific Speakers’ Gesturing Styles – They build an algorithmic model of Jay Leno’s body language and have the virtual Leno recite the intro crawl from Star Wars. The paper is actually pretty interesting; lots of good observations about body language (from a weird CS algorithm perspective).