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A Progressive Refinement Approach for the Visualisation of Implicit Surfaces

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Advances in Computer Graphics and Computer Vision

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 4))

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Abstract

Visualising implicit surfaces with the ray casting method is a slow procedure. The design cycle of a new implicit surface is, therefore, fraught with long latency times as a user must wait for the surface to be rendered before being able to decide what changes should be introduced in the next iteration. In this paper, we present an attempt at reducing the design cycle of an implicit surface modeler by introducing a progressive refinement rendering approach to the visualisation of implicit surfaces. This progressive refinement renderer provides a quick previewing facility. It first displays a low quality estimate of what the final rendering is going to be and, as the computation progresses, increases the quality of this estimate at a steady rate. The progressive refinement algorithm is based on the adaptive subdivision of the viewing frustrum into smaller cells. An estimate for the variation of the implicit function inside each cell is obtained with an affine arithmetic range estimation technique. Overall, we show that our progressive refinement approach not only provides the user with visual feedback as the rendering advances but is also capable of completing the image faster than a conventional implicit surface rendering algorithm based on ray casting.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, The University of Sheffield, UK

    Manuel N. Gamito & Steve C. Maddock

Authors
  1. Manuel N. Gamito
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  2. Steve C. Maddock
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. ESTSetúbal/IPS, Setúbal, Portugal

    José Braz

  2. INSTICC, Setúbal, Portugal

    Alpesh Ranchordas

  3. Universidade de Coimbra, Portugal

    Helder Araújo

  4. Instituto Superior Técnico/UTL, Lisboa, Portugal

    Joaquim Jorge

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© 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Gamito, M.N., Maddock, S.C. (2007). A Progressive Refinement Approach for the Visualisation of Implicit Surfaces. In: Braz, J., Ranchordas, A., Araújo, H., Jorge, J. (eds) Advances in Computer Graphics and Computer Vision. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 4. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-75274-5_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-75274-5_6

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-75272-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-75274-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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