Full surround 3D imaging for shape acquisition is essential for generating digital replicas of real-world objects. Surrounding an object we seek to scan with a kaleidoscope, that is, a configuration ...of multiple planar mirrors, produces an image of the object that encodes information from a combinatorially large number of virtual viewpoints. This information is practically useful for the full surround 3D reconstruction of the object, but cannot be used directly, as we do not know what virtual viewpoint each image pixel corresponds---the pixel label. We introduce a structured light system that combines a projector and a camera with a kaleidoscope. We then prove that we can accurately determine the labels of projector and camera pixels, for arbitrary kaleidoscope configurations, using the projector-camera epipolar geometry. We use this result to show that our system can serve as a multi-view structured light system with hundreds of virtual projectors and cameras. This makes our system capable of scanning complex shapes precisely and with full coverage. We demonstrate the advantages of the kaleidoscopic structured light system by scanning objects that exhibit a large range of shapes and reflectances.
When judging the optical properties of a translucent object, humans often look at sharp geometric features such as edges and thin parts. An analysis of the physics of light transport shows that these ...sharp geometries are necessary for scientific imaging systems to be able to accurately measure the underlying material optical properties. In this article, we examine whether human perception of translucency is likewise affected by the presence of sharp geometry, by confounding our perceptual inferences about an object's optical properties. We use physically accurate simulations to create visual stimuli of translucent materials with varying shapes and optical properties under different illuminations. We then use these stimuli in psychophysical experiments, where human observers are asked to match an image of a target object by adjusting the material parameters of a match object with different geometric sharpness, lighting, and three-dimensional geometry. We find that the level of geometric sharpness significantly affects perceived translucency by observers. These findings generalize across a few illumination conditions and object shapes. Our results suggest that the perceived translucency of an object depends on both the underlying material's optical parameters and the three-dimensional shape of the object. We also find that models based on image contrast cannot fully predict the perceptual results.
Abstract
Ultrasonically-sculpted gradient-index optical waveguides enable non-invasive light confinement inside scattering media. The confinement level strongly depends on ultrasound parameters ...(e.g., amplitude, frequency), and medium optical properties (e.g., extinction coefficient). We develop a physically-accurate simulator, and use it to quantify these dependencies for a radially-symmetric virtual optical waveguide. Our analysis provides insights for optimizing virtual optical waveguides for given applications. We leverage these insights to configure virtual optical waveguides that improve light confinement fourfold compared to previous configurations at five mean free paths. We show that virtual optical waveguides enhance light throughput by 50% compared to an ideal external lens, in a medium with bladder-like optical properties at one transport mean free path. We corroborate these simulation findings with real experiments: we demonstrate, for the first time, that virtual optical waveguides recycle scattered light, and enhance light throughput by 15% compared to an external lens at five transport mean free paths.
We present a computational imaging system, inspired by the optical coherence tomography (OCT) framework, that uses interferometry to produce decompositions of light transport in small scenes or ...volumes. The system decomposes transport according to various attributes of the paths that photons travel through the scene, including where on the source the paths originate, their pathlengths from source to camera through the scene, their wavelength, and their polarization. Since it uses interference, the system can achieve high pathlength resolutions, with the ability to distinguish paths whose lengths differ by as little as ten microns. We describe how to construct and optimize an optical assembly for this technique, and we build a prototype to measure and visualize three-dimensional shape, direct and indirect reflection components, and properties of scattering, refractive/dispersive, and birefringent materials.
Multiple scattering contributes critically to the characteristic translucent appearance of food, liquids, skin, and crystals; but little is known about how it is perceived by human observers. This ...article explores the perception of translucency by studying the image effects of variations in one factor of multiple scattering: the phase function. We consider an expanded space of phase functions created by linear combinations of Henyey-Greenstein and von Mises-Fisher lobes, and we study this physical parameter space using computational data analysis and psychophysics.
Our study identifies a two-dimensional embedding of the physical scattering parameters in a perceptually meaningful appearance space. Through our analysis of this space, we find uniform parameterizations of its two axes by analytical expressions of moments of the phase function, and provide an intuitive characterization of the visual effects that can be achieved at different parts of it. We show that our expansion of the space of phase functions enlarges the range of achievable translucent appearance compared to traditional single-parameter phase function models. Our findings highlight the important role phase function can have in controlling translucent appearance, and provide tools for manipulating its effect in material design applications.
Physics-based differentiable rendering, the estimation of derivatives of radiometric measures with respect to arbitrary scene parameters, has a diverse array of applications from solving ...analysis-by-synthesis problems to training machine learning pipelines incorporating forward rendering processes. Unfortunately, general-purpose differentiable rendering remains challenging due to the lack of efficient estimators as well as the need to identify and handle complex discontinuities such as visibility boundaries. In this paper, we show how path integrals can be differentiated with respect to arbitrary differentiable changes of a scene. We provide a detailed theoretical analysis of this process and establish new differentiable rendering formulations based on the resulting differential path integrals. Our path-space differentiable rendering formulation allows the design of new Monte Carlo estimators that offer significantly better efficiency than state-of-the-art methods in handling complex geometric discontinuities and light transport phenomena such as caustics. We validate our method by comparing our derivative estimates to those generated using the finite-difference method. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our technique, we compare inverse-rendering performance with a few state-of-the-art differentiable rendering methods.
•Tree regression algorithm using a statistical test to control the size of the tree.•Formulation of an optimal subset selection model using information criteria.•Integration of subset selection model ...to the algorithm for node splitting.•Competitive performance against established literature tree regression algorithms.
Regression analysis is a statistical procedure that fits a mathematical function to a set of data in order to capture the relationship between dependent and independent variables. In tree regression, tree structures are constructed by repeated splits of the input space into two subsets, creating if-then-else rules. Such models are popular in the literature due to their ability to be computed quickly and their simple interpretations. This work introduces a tree regression algorithm that exploits an optimisation model of an existing literature method called Mathematical Programming Tree (MPtree) to optimally split nodes into subsets and applies a statistical test to assess the quality of the partitioning. Additionally, an approach of splitting nodes using multivariate decision rules is explored in this work and compared in terms of performance and computational efficiency. Finally, a novel mathematical model is introduced that performs subset selection on each node in order to select an optimal set of variables to considered for splitting, that improves the computational performance of the proposed algorithm.
Physics-based differentiable rendering is the task of estimating the derivatives of radiometric measures with respect to scene parameters. The ability to compute these derivatives is necessary for ...enabling gradient-based optimization in a diverse array of applications: from solving analysis-by-synthesis problems to training machine learning pipelines incorporating forward rendering processes. Unfortunately, physics-based differentiable rendering remains challenging, due to the complex and typically nonlinear relation between pixel intensities and scene parameters.
We introduce a differential theory of radiative transfer, which shows how individual components of the radiative transfer equation (RTE) can be differentiated with respect to arbitrary differentiable changes of a scene. Our theory encompasses the same generality as the standard RTE, allowing differentiation while accurately handling a large range of light transport phenomena such as volumetric absorption and scattering, anisotropic phase functions, and heterogeneity. To numerically estimate the derivatives given by our theory, we introduce an unbiased Monte Carlo estimator supporting arbitrary surface and volumetric configurations. Our technique differentiates path contributions symbolically and uses additional boundary integrals to capture geometric discontinuities such as visibility changes.
We validate our method by comparing our derivative estimations to those generated using the finite-difference method. Furthermore, we use a few synthetic examples inspired by real-world applications in inverse rendering, non-line-of-sight (NLOS) and biomedical imaging, and design, to demonstrate the practical usefulness of our technique.
Adjoint nonlinear ray tracing Teh, Arjun; O'Toole, Matthew; Gkioulekas, Ioannis
ACM transactions on graphics,
07/2022, Letnik:
41, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Reconstructing and designing media with continuously-varying refractive index fields remains a challenging problem in computer graphics. A core difficulty in trying to tackle this inverse problem is ...that light travels inside such media along curves, rather than straight lines. Existing techniques for this problem make strong assumptions on the shape of the ray inside the medium, and thus limit themselves to media where the ray deflection is relatively small. More recently, differentiable rendering techniques have relaxed this limitation, by making it possible to differentiably simulate curved light paths. However, the automatic differentiation algorithms underlying these techniques use large amounts of memory, restricting existing differentiable rendering techniques to relatively small media and low spatial resolutions. We present a method for optimizing refractive index fields that both accounts for curved light paths and has a small, constant memory footprint. We use the adjoint state method to derive a set of equations for computing derivatives with respect to the refractive index field of optimization objectives that are subject to nonlinear ray tracing constraints. We additionally introduce discretization schemes to numerically evaluate these equations, without the need to store nonlinear ray trajectories in memory, significantly reducing the memory requirements of our algorithm. We use our technique to optimize high-resolution refractive index fields for a variety of applications, including creating different types of displays (multiview, lightfield, caustic), designing gradient-index optics, and reconstructing gas flows.