Keynotes:
Kari Pulli - Recent Advances in Mobile Graphics
Werner Purgathofer - Illustrative Visualization of Volume Data

Tutorials:
Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann, Parag Chaudhuri, Daniel Thalmann - Real-time Virtual Humans
Vaclav Skala - Mathematical Foundations for Computer Graphics and Computer Vision
 

Keynote: Mobile Visual I/O
Kari Pulli, Nokia Research Center, Palo Alto, CA, USA

Mobile devices are the new frontier in computation, internet connectivity, imaging, and computer graphics. For many people it provides their first computer of any kind. For example in China there are about 100 million PCs but over 400 million mobile phones. And the sales of camera phones far surpass the number of digital or any other types of consumer cameras. The visual capabilities of these devices have progressed at amazing pace, and today the high-end smart phones have large color screens, fast CPUs, even dedicated graphics HW acceleration.

We will cover the short history of mobile 3D graphics, and introduce recent mobile graphics standards such as OpenGL ES, M3G, and OpenVG; these provide visual output. In recent years photography and graphics have begun to move closer to each other, we will also discuss computational and contextual photography and augmented reality as fertile research topics and present some results; these provide visual input.
 

Kari Pulli is a Research Fellow at Nokia Research Center in Palo Alto, CA, USA. He has been an active contributor to several mobile graphics standards and heads many graphics and imaging research activities at Nokia. Kari has a PhD in computer science from University of Washington and Lic. Tech., M.Sc., and MBA from University of Oulu, where he also taught computer graphics for several years as an adjunct faculty. Before Nokia Kari has worked on graphics at Stanford University, Alias|Wavefront, SGI, and Microsoft; during 2004-06 Kari was also a Visiting Scientist at MIT. Kari is a member of the Eurographics Executive Committee.

Keynote: Illustrative Visualization of Volume Data
Werner Purgathofer

Illustrations are essential for the effective communication of complex subjects. Their production, however, is a difficult and expensive task. In recent years, three-dimensional imaging has become a vital tool not only in medical diagnosis and treatment planning, but also in many technical disciplines (e.g., material inspection), biology, and archeology. Modalities such as X-Ray Computed Tomography (CT) and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) produce high-resolution volumetric scans on a daily basis. It seems counterintuitive that even though such a wealth of data is available, the production of an illustration should still require a mainly manual and time-consuming process. This talk describes methods for the computerassisted generation of illustrations directly from volumetric data using advanced visualization techniques. The use of a direct volume illustration system is shown for this purpose. Instead of requiring an additional modeling step, this system allows the designer of an illustration to work directly on the measured data. Abstraction, a key component of traditional illustrations, is used in order to reduce visual clutter, emphasize important structures, and reveal hidden detail. Low-level abstraction techniques are concerned with the appearance of objects and allow exible artistic shading of structures in volumetric data sets. High-level abstraction techniques control which objects are visible. For this purpose, novel methods for the generation of ghosted and exploded views are explained. The visualization techniques presented in this talk were developed and implemented by Stefan Bruckner and employ the features of current graphics hardware to achieve interactive performance. The resulting system allows the generation of expressive illustrations directly from volumetric data with applications in medical training, patient education, and scientic communication.

Werner Purgathofer completed the study of technical mathematics at the Vienna University of Technology in 1980, and continued at the same recent years, three-dimensional imaging has become a vital tool not only in medical diagnosis and treatment planning, but also in many technical disciplines (e.g., material inspection), biology, and archeology. Modalities such as X-Ray Computed Tomography (CT) and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) produce high-resolution volumetric scans on a daily basis. It seems counterintuitive that even though such a wealth of data is available, the production of an illustration should still require a mainly manual and time-consuming process.

TUTORIAL 1: RealTime Virtual Humans
Nadia MagnenatThalmann, , MIRALabUniversity of Geneva
Parag Chaudhuri, MIRALabUniversity of Geneva
Daniel Thalmann, EPFL

This tutorial surveys techniques for modeling, animation of virtual humans, and simulation of crowds. The tutorial is organized with respect to the following sessions:

SESSION 1: Modeling Virtual Humans from Scan Data or Measurements & Modeling Hair and Clothes
Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann, MIRALab-University of Geneva

This session will focus on the fast creation of any virtual human shape from scanned data or measurements. We will also show how to define and animate hair and clothes and what is the state of the art today. Several examples will be shown from our ongoing EU Research projects.

SESSION 2: Animation of Interactive Virtual Humans
Parag Chaudhuri, MIRALab-University of Geneva

This session will focus on animation of interactive virtual humans. We will start with a brief discussion of how the methods for real time animation of humans have progressed over the years, ranging from pure kinematics based solutions to procedural solutions to a mix of physically-based and kinematics based solutions. We will talk briefly about animation synthesis and adaptation. We will look at the special requirements for developing interactive virtual human characters and finally finish with the current work being done in this area and a discussion of applications in games and mixed reality experiences.

SESSION 3: Crowd Simulation
Daniel Thalmann, EPFL, Switzerland

This section will focus on the methods to animate a large number of virtual humans. Techniques to create various people with different animations will be presented as well as the rendering pipeline and the way of interacting with crowds.

TUTORIAL 2: Mathematical Foundations for Computer Graphics and Computer Vision
Vaclav Skala, University of West Bohemia

The aim of this tutorial is to give an “engineering” overview of mathematics for computer graphics and computer vision, to show how some known algorithms can be easily reformulated and modified in order to obtain more general and/or faster and robust algorithms.

Computer graphics, computer vision, medical imaging systems and signal processing applications use standard approaches to numerical mathematics and computation of geometric entities in the Euclidean space. This approach and representation is unfortunately very unstable in “close to singular” cases. The tutorial will present an alternative approaches using projective space and geometry algebra and representation. Such approaches lead to very stable computational algorithms computations.

The tutorial covers the following topics: Euclidean, affine and projective spaces, principle of duality, coordinate systems including homogeneous, barycentric and Plucker coordinates, data representations, quaternions, fundamentals of vectors and matrix algebra, geometric transformations 2D and 3D, projections, interpolation of “ordered” and scattered data, intersections of geometrical primitives, algorithm complexity, robustness and computational stability issues. Examples demonstrate how to apply the presented mathematics in computer graphics and computer vision effectively.

The tutorial will present some fundamentals of GPU computation principles as well.

The tutorial will not cover geometric modeling issues – parametric curves and surfaces etc.

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