Form and Light: Computer Graphics Research at IMM

Andreas Bærentzen

Most of our research projects focus on the manipulation of 3D geometry, simulation of global illumination or visualization of (mostly medical) volume data. The goal of this talk is to give an overview of the graphics research carried out by the group as well as to present some of the projects in more detail.

Volume Graphics is the manipulation and visualization of scalar data arranged on a (regular) 3D grid. Much of this data originates from medical scans (e.g. MR or CT). In this case, we typically want to segment and visualize the data. However, volume data can also be generated synthetically; typically in the form of discrete distance fields. Such distance fields have interesting applications to 3D modelling. We have proposed new techniques for interactive 3D modelling using volume data, point rendering techniques for volume data, and a new method for distance field generation.

Global illumination is about rendering images while taking into account not only the light coming directly from the light sources. This includes such phenomena as shadows, specular reflections, indirect illumination, transparency. In short, anything above and beyond simple Gouraud shading with a number of direct lights. In the past years, great strides have been made in the field of global illumination both for real-time rendering and off-line rendering. At the department we have contributed to these developments by research in techniques for real-time rendering of reflections, soft shadows, caustics, and indirect illumination using real-time photon mapping.

A current research project is based on using the GPU to create layered depth images from polygonal models. This conversion has a number of interesting applications such as point generation or remeshing.

Finally, we have a number of mid-term and master's projects which cover a wide spectrum of topics. However, most of them are related to real-time rendering or the interactive modelling of 3D objects. Recent midterm and master's projects include (amongst others) a constraint based polygonal 3D modelling system, a very fast terrain rendering system (which won the poster award last year), an efficient real-time simulation of water, and a technique for accelerated subdivision surface rendering.