In this article, we propose an efficient and accurate compressive-sensing-based method for estimating the light transport characteristics of real-world scenes. Although compressive sensing allows the efficient estimation of a high-dimensional signal with a sparse or near-to-sparse representation from a small number of samples, the computational cost of the compressive sensing in estimating the ...

The last few years have witnessed a significant increase in the use of databases for complex data analysis (OLAP) applications. These applications often require very quick responses from the DBMS. However, they also involve complex queries on large volumes of data. Despite significant improvement in database support for OLAP over the last few years, most DBMSs still fall short of providing quic...

Normal mapping is a variant of bump mapping that is commonly used in computer games. It models complex surface variations by explicitly storing a surface normal in a texture map. However, it has not been used with precomputed radiance transfer (PRT), a technique for modeling an object’s response to a parameterized model of lighting, which enables interactive rendering of complex global illumina...

Mixed Reality and its concept of virtual superimposed on real space interplay invoke such interactive experiences that promote new patterns of believability and presence for cultural heritage applications. The seamless integration of virtual cultural artifacts with ‘real lights’ or images of real scenes, is an important step towards believability and consistency in synthesized MR scenes. That s...

Parallel projection z-buffer images are precomputed for a number of preset viewing directions on the unit sphere. Using the depth information, we can reconstruct a 3-D point from each image pixel. Then parallel or perspective views can be found from any other viewpoint by rotating the 3-D points from the nearest three or four precomputed views into the proper position and projecting them onto a...

Real-time shading using general (e.g., anisotropic) BRDFs has so far been limited to a few point or directional light sources. We extend such shading to smooth, area lighting using a low-order spherical harmonic basis for the lighting environment. We represent the 4D product function of BRDF times the cosine factor (dot product of the incident lighting and surface normal vectors) as a 2D table ...