What does RiBasis which is described in RenderMan mean? - curve

I'm working on a plugin of 3ds Max. In this plugin, I export the geometry information into a .rib file which can be rendered by a RenderMan renderer. When I export a nubrs curve's data into .rib file described by RiBasis and RiCurve. I use the RtBsplineBasis in RiBasis, but I get the wrong result that the rendered curve is short than the result of 3ds Max's renderer. Then I reprint the first and the last control vertex, the curve is long enough, but its shape is a little different.Who can tell me how I get wrong result or what does RiBasis mean? How can get correct RiBasis? Thank u very much!

RiCurve draws a cubic spline. The control points do not uniquely determine the curve; you also need the basis, which is expressed as a 4x4 matrix -- one matrix give the coefficients you need for a B-spline, Bezier, Catmull-Rom, and so on, and of course you can also supply the matrix yourself for some kind of hybrid interpolant that isn't quite one of the standard 3 or 4. The basis determines the character of the spline -- whether the curve is guaranteed to go through the control points or is merely approximating, the degree of continuity, the "tension", and so on.
There is a great discussion in one of the appendices of "The RenderMan Companion," including numeric examples of how different basis matrices affect the interpolation.
It sounds like you requested a B-spline basis, which is approximating (not interpolating) and continuous in both 1st and 2nd derivatives. Maybe that's not what you had in mind. It's hard to tell, since you didn't describe the properties of the spline that you were hoping for.
As an aside, approximating an arbitrary NURBS curve with a nonrational cubic is not always going to give you an exact match. Something else to keep in mind.

Related

Raytracing via diffusion algorithm

Many certain resources about raytracing tells about:
"shoot rays, find the first obstacle to cut it"
"shoot secondary rays..."
"or, do it reverse and approximate/interpolate"
I didnt see any algortihm that uses a diffusion algorithm. Lets assume a point-light is a point that has more density than other cells(all space is divided into cells), every step/iteration of lighting/tracing makes that source point to diffuse into neighbours using a velocity field and than their neighbours and continues like that. After some satisfactory iterations(such as 30-40 iterations), the density info of each cell is used for enlightment of objects in that cell.
Point light and velocity field:
But it has to be a like 1000x1000x1000 size and this would take too much time and memory to compute. Maybe just computing 10x10x10 and when finding an obstacle, partitioning that area to 100x100x100(in a dynamic kd-tree fashion) can help generating lighting/shadows for acceptable resolution? Especially for vertex-based illumination rather than triangle.
Has anyone tried this approach?
Note: Velocity field is here to make light diffuse to outwards mostly(not %100 but %99 to have some global illumination). Finite-element-method can make this embarassingly-parallel.
Edit: any object that is hit by a positive-density will be an obstacle to generate a new velocity field around the surface of it. So light cannot go through that object but can be mirrored to another direction.(if it is a lens object than light diffuse harder through it) So the reflection of light can affect other objects with a higher iteration limit
Same kd-tree can be used in object-collision algorithms :)
Just to take as a grain of salt: a neural-network can be trained for advection&diffusion in a 30x30x30 grid and that can be used in a "gpu(opencl/cuda)-->neural-network ---> finite element method --->shadows" way.
There's a couple problems with this as it stands.
The first problem is that, fundamentally, a photon in the Newtonian sense doesn't react or change based on the density of other photons around. So using a density field and trying to light to follow the classic Navier-Stokes style solutions (which is what you're trying to do, based on the density field explanation you gave) would result in incorrect results. It would also, given enough iterations, result in complete entropy over the scene, which is also not what happens to light.
Even if you were to get rid of the density problem, you're still left with the the problem of multiple photons going different directions in the same cell, which is required for global illumination and diffuse lighting.
So, stripping away the problem portions of your idea, what you're left with is a particle system for photons :P
Now, to be fair, sudo-particle systems are currently used for global illumination solutions. This type of thing is called Photon Mapping, but it's only simple to implement a direct lighting solution using it :P

SVG convert polygon to curves conversion in Javascript

How can I convert a polygon shape to a curve in JS/SVG?
I have seen this solution: http://jsdraw2d.jsfiction.com/ but this seems to be dealing with VML and not SVG.
Is there something out-of-the-box that can be used to accurately convert a polygon to a path without ANY loss of quality?
When I say path I don't mean a path with >4000 nodes. I mean a path with curves instead of many nodes. Which in turn means reducing the node count since the polygons would be converted into curves.
I assume, that while polygonizing, you sampled points on the curve, and joined them with straight lines.
The reverse process is curve fitting.
You want to do a "Hermite fitting of curve through a set of points". A little search will help you out.
There are more such fitting algorithms. This is maths based and the under the hood solution to what you want. This is also how most such problems are solved.
If you want a quick solution, you would have to find a library that does it for you. i.e take a set of points, and fits a curve through them.
Note: I assume that fitting a curve through more than 4000 nodes is going to be costly. You could try it and see the performance for yourself, as I am not sure how costly would this be. But, I would suggest that if you needed to maintain the accuracy of your boolean operation. You should not have polygonized them at first. It is just redundancy of efforts to lose accuracy only to gain it back. Boolean set operations can be be done, and are done, without polygonizing the curve data.
Links for reference, and demos
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spline_interpolation
http://www.math.ucla.edu/~baker/java/hoefer/Spline.htm
http://www.math.ucla.edu/~baker/java/hoefer/Lagrange.htm

Finding cross on the image

I have set of binary images, on which i need to find the cross (examples attached). I use findcontours to extract borders from the binary image. But i can't understand how can i determine is this shape (border) cross or not? Maybe opencv has some built-in methods, which could help to solve this problem. I thought to solve this problem using Machine learning, but i think there is a simpler way to do this. Thanks!
Viola-Jones object detection could be a good start. Though the main usage of the algorithm (AFAIK) is face detection, it was actually designed for any object detection, such as your cross.
The algorithm is Machine-Learning based algorithm (so, you will need a set of classified "crosses" and a set of classified "not crosses"), and you will need to identify the significant "features" (patterns) that will help the algorithm recognize crosses.
The algorithm is implemented in OpenCV as cvHaarDetectObjects()
From the original image, lets say you've extracted sets of polygons that could potentially be your cross. Assuming that all of the cross is visible, to the extent that all edges can be distinguished as having a length, you could try the following.
Reject all polygons that did not have exactly 12 vertices required to
form your polygon.
Re-order the vertices such that the shortest edge length is first.
Create a best fit perspective transformation that maps your vertices onto a cross of uniform size
Examine the residuals generated by using this transformation to project your cross back onto the uniform cross, where the residual for any given point is the distance between the projected point and the corresponding uniform point.
If all the residuals are within your defined tolerance, you've found a cross.
Note that this works primarily due to the simplicity of the geometric shape you're searching for. Your contours will also need to have noise removed for this to work, e.g. each line within the cross needs to be converted to a single simple line.
Depending on your requirements, you could try some local feature detector like SIFT or SURF. Check OpenSURF which is an interesting implementation of the latter.
after some days of struggle, i came to a conclusion that the only robust way here is to use SVM + HOG. That's all.
You could erode each blob and analyze their number of pixels is going down. No mater the rotation scaling of the crosses they should always go down with the same ratio, excepted when you're closing down on the remaining center. Again, when the blob is small enough you should expect it to be in the center of the original blob. You won't need any machine learning algorithm or training data to resolve this.

Recognizing distortions in a regular grid

To give you some background as to what I'm doing: I'm trying to quantitatively record variations in flow of a compressible fluid via image analysis. One way to do this is to exploit the fact that the index of refraction of the fluid is directly related to its density. If you set up some kind of image behind the flow, the distortion in the image due to refractive index changes throughout the fluid field leads you to a density gradient, which helps to characterize the flow pattern.
I have a set of routines that do this successfully with a regular 2D pattern of dots. The dot pattern is slightly distorted, and by comparing the position of the dots in the distorted image with that in the non-distorted image, I get a displacement field, which is exactly what I need. The problem with this method is resolution. The resolution is limited to the number of dots in the field, and I'm exploring methods that give me more data.
One idea I've had is to use a regular grid of horizontal and vertical lines. This image will distort the same way, but instead of getting only the displacement of a dot, I'll have the continuous distortion of a grid. It seems like there must be some standard algorithm or procedure to compare one geometric grid to another and infer some kind of displacement field. Nonetheless, I haven't found anything like this in my research.
Does anyone have some ideas that might point me in the right direction? FYI, I am not a computer scientist -- I'm an engineer. I say that only because there may be some obvious approach I'm neglecting due to coming from a different field. But I can program. I'm using MATLAB, but I can read Python, C/C++, etc.
Here are examples of the type of images I'm working with:
Regular: Distorted:
--------
I think you are looking for the Digital Image Correlation algorithm.
Here you can see a demo.
Here is a Matlab Implementation.
From Wikipedia:
Digital Image Correlation and Tracking (DIC/DDIT) is an optical method that employs tracking & image registration techniques for accurate 2D and 3D measurements of changes in images. This is often used to measure deformation (engineering), displacement, and strain, but it is widely applied in many areas of science and engineering.
Edit
Here I applied the DIC algorithm to your distorted image using Mathematica, showing the relative displacements.
Edit
You may also easily identify the maximum displacement zone:
Edit
After some work (quite a bit, frankly) you can come up to something like this, representing the "displacement field", showing clearly that you are dealing with a vortex:
(Darker and bigger arrows means more displacement (velocity))
Post me a comment if you are interested in the Mathematica code for this one. I think my code is not going to help anybody else, so I omit posting it.
I would also suggest a line tracking algorithm would work well.
Simply start at the first pixel line of the image and start following each of the vertical lines downwards (You just need to start this at the first line to get the starting points. This can be done by a simple pattern that moves orthogonally to the gradient of that line, ergo follows a line. When you reach a crossing of a horizontal line you can measure that point (in x,y coordinates) and compare it to the corresponding crossing point in your distorted image.
Since your grid is regular you know that the n'th measured crossing point on the m'th vertical black line are corresponding in both images. Then you simply compare both points by computing their distance. Do this for each line on your grid and you will get, by how far each crossing point of the grid is distorted.
This following a line algorithm is also used in basic Edge linking algorithms or the Canny Edge detector.
(All this are just theoretic ideas and I cannot provide you with an algorithm to it. But I guess it should work easily on distorted images like you have there... but maybe it is helpful for you)

Algorithm for following the path of ridges on a 3D image

I'm trying to find an algorithm (or algorithm ideas) for following a ridge on a 3D image, derived from a digital elevation model (DEM). I've managed to get very basic program working which just iterates across each row of the image marking a ridge line wherever it finds a large change in aspect (ie. from < 180 degrees to > 180 degrees).
However, the lines this produces aren't brilliant, there are often gaps and various strange artefacts. I'm hoping to try and extend this by using some sort of algorithm to follow the ridge lines, thus producing lines that are complete (that is, no gaps) and more accurate.
A number of people have mentioned snake algorithms to me, but they don't seem to be quite what I'm looking for. I've also done a lot of searching about path-finding algorithms, but again, they don't seem to be quite the right thing.
Does anyone have any suggestions for types or algorithms or specific algorithms I should look at?
Update: I've been asked to add some more detail on the exact area I'll be applying this to. It's working with gridded elevation data of sand dunes. I'm trying to extract the crests if these sand dunes, which look similar to the boundaries between drainage basins, but can be far more complex (for example, there can be multiple sand dunes very close to each other with gradually merging crests)
You can get a good estimate of the ridges using sign changes of the curvature. Note that the curvature will be near infinity at flat regions. Hence possible psuedo-code for a ridge detection algorithm could be:
for each face in the mesh
compute 1/curvature
if abs(1/curvature) != zeroTolerance
flag face as ridge
else
continue
(zeroTolerance is a number near but not equal to zero e.g. 0.003 etc)
Also Meshlab provides a module for normal & curvature estimation on most formats. You can test the idea using it, before you code it up.
I don't know how what your data is like or how much automation you need. This won't work if if consists of peaks without clear ridges (but then you probably wouldn't be asking the question.)
startPoint = highest point in DEM (or on ridge)
curPoint = startPoint;
line += curPoint;
Loop
curPoint = highest point adjacent to curPoint not in line; // (Don't backtrack)
line += point;
Repeat
Curious what the real solution turns out to be.
Edited to add: depending on the coarseness of your data set, 'point' can be a single point or a smoothed average of a local region of points.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ridge_detection
You can treat the elevation as you would a grayscale color, then use a 2D edge recognition filter. There are lots of edge recognition methods available. The best would depend on your specific needs.

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