Efficient Image-Space Data Reuse in Computer Graphics

PhD Thesis Proposal Defence


Title: "Efficient Image-Space Data Reuse in Computer Graphics"

by

Mr. Lei YANG


ABSTRACT:

Spatio-temporal coherence and data reuse are important problems in digital 
image synthesis and processing. The existence of coherence, i.e. local 
data similarity, usually leads to redundancy of data and computations in 
virtually every stage of the pipeline. By exploiting such coherence, we 
can potentially reduce a large amount of unnecessary computations. This 
not only has the benefit of accelerating the process, but also provides 
opportunities to improve the result quality with the additional data that 
are not available otherwise.

In this thesis, we introduce techniques for spatial and temporal data 
reuse that benefit a number of real-time rendering and image-processing 
applications. For simplicity and efficiency, we explore methods that 
operate in image space. Moreover, for all the applications, we seek to 
design parallel real-time algorithms that executes on the GPU or 
multi-core CPU. This may limit the class of techniques that we can use, 
but the high efficiency can benefit a much wider range of high-performance 
graphics applications.

For spatial data reuse, we first show how the results of interpolating 
sparse shading data on an image can be improved with an edge-preserving 
filter. We then introduce a sampling scheme that accelerates the costly 
computation of diffuse indirect illumination by allowing spatial data 
share. Moreover, in the field of image processing, we demonstrate how data 
in coherent regions can be reused to fix antialiased edges that are 
damaged by non-linear filters. For temporal data reuse, we introduce a few 
techniques and tools for improving the performance of data reprojection -- 
a fundamental operation for temporal data reuse. We then propose a 
technique for effectively amortizing the computation of supersampling over 
time. This comes with a principled analysis of the quality associated with 
repeated reprojection. Finally, we show an efficient frame-interpolation 
technique that significantly improves framerate for general real-time 
rendering applications.


Date:                   Monday, 18 April 2011

Time:                   2:00pm - 4:00pm

Venue:                  Room 3408
                         lifts 17/18

Committee Members:      Dr. Pedro Sander (Supervisor)
                         Prof. Long Quan (Chairperson)
                         Dr. Huamin Qu
                         Dr. Chiew-Lan Tai


**** ALL are Welcome ****