The goal of scattered data interpolation techniques is to construct a (typically smooth) function from a set of unorganized samples. These techniques have a wide range of applications in computer graphics. For instance they can be used to model a surface from a set of sparse samples, to reconstruct a BRDF from a set of measurements, to interpolate motion capture data, or to compute the physical properties of a fluid. This course will survey and compare scattered interpolation algorithms and describe their applications in computer graphics. Although the course is focused on applying these techniques, we will introduce some of the underlying mathematical theory and briefly mention numerical considerations.

We apply a neurobiological model of visual attention and gaze control to the automatic animation of a photorealistic virtual human head. The attention model simulates biological visual processing along the occipito-parietal pathway of the primate brain. The gaze control model is derived from motion capture of human subjects, using high-speed video-based eye and head tracking apparatus. Given an arbitrary video clip, the model predicts visual locations most likely to attract an observer's attention, and simulates the dynamics of eye and head movements towards these locations. Tested on 85 video clips including synthetic stimuli, video games, TV news, sports, and outdoor scenes, the model demonstrates a strong ability at saccading towards and tracking salient targets. The resulting autonomous virtual human animation is of photorealistic quality

Speech-driven facial motion synthesis is a well explored research topic. However, little has been done to model expressive visual behavior during speech. We address this issue using a machine learning approach that relies on a database of speech-related high-fidelity facial motions. From this training set, we derive a generative model of expressive facial motion that incorporates emotion control, while maintaining accurate lip-synching. The emotional content of the input speech can be manually specified by the user or automatically extracted from the audio signal using a Support Vector Machine classifier.

We implement a framework for animating interactive characters by combining kinematic animation with physical simulation. The combination of animation techniques allows the characters to exploit the advantages of each technique. For example, characters can perform natural-looking kinematic gaits and react dynamically to unexpected situations. Kinematic techniques such as those based on motion capture data can create very natural-looking animation. However, motion capture based techniques are not suitable for modeling the complex interactions between dynamically interacting characters. Physical simulation, on the other hand, is well suited for such tasks. Our work develops kinematic and dynamic controllers and transition methods between the two control methods for interactive character animation. In addition, we utilize the motion graph technique to develop complex kinematic animation from shorter motion clips as a method of kinematic control.

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The Institute for Creative Technologies is a federally funded research center set up three years ago at the University of Southern California to advance the state of the art in immersive training. Teaming researchers in artificial intelligence, graphics, animation and immersive audio with Hollywood writers, directors and special effect artists, the ICT brings a unique mix of high-technology and professional storytelling esthetic to the problem of creating compelling immersive environments. This afternoon tutorial will consist of a panel presentation by top ICT affiliated researchers to discuss this wide range of technologies and skills and how they relate to the design of virtual environments. The panel will be followed by a tour of the ICT facilities and demonstrations of several virtual training systems.

In this paper we present a novel method for creating realistic, controllable motion. Given a corpus of motion capture data, we automatically construct a directed graph called a motion graph that encapsulates connections among the database. The motion graph consists both of pieces of original motion and automatically generated transitions. Motion can be generated simply by building walks on the graph. We present a general framework for extracting particular graph walks that meet a user's specifications. We then show how this framework can be applied to the specific problem of generating different styles of locomotion along arbitrary paths.

Given video footage of a person's face, we present new techniques to automatically recover the face position and the facial expression from each frame in the video sequence. A 3D face model is fitted to each frame using a continuous optimization technique. Our model is based on a set of 3D face models that are linearly combined using 3D morphing. Our method has the advantages over previous techniques of fitting directly a realistic 3-dimensional face model and of recovering parameters that can be used directly in an animation system. We also explore many applications, including performance-driven animation (applying the recovered position and expression of the face to a synthetic character to produce an animation that mimics the input video), relighting the face, varying the camera position, and adding facial ornaments such as tattoos and scars.

We have created a system for capturing both the three-dimensional geometry and color and shading information for human facial expressions.We use this data to reconstruct photorealistic, 3D animations of the captured expressions.The system uses a large set of sampling points on the face to accurately track the three dimensional deformations of the face.Simultaneously with the tracking of the geometric data, we capture multiple high resolution, registered video images of the face.These images are used to create a texture map sequence for a three dimensional polygonal face model which can then be rendered on standard 3D graphics hardware.The resulting facial animation is surprisingly life-like and looks very much like the original live performance.Separating the capture of the geometry from the texture images eliminates much of the variance in the image data due to motion, which increases compression ratios.Although the primary emphasis of our work is not compression we have investigated the use of a novel method to compress the geometric data based on principal components analysis.The texture sequence is compressed using an MPEG4 video codec.Animations reconstructed from 512x512 pixel textures look good at data rates as low as 240 Kbits per second.

Article Free Access Share on Synthesizing realistic facial expressions from photographs Authors: Frédéric Pighin Univ. of Washington, Seattle Univ. of Washington, SeattleView Profile , Jamie Hecker Univ. of Washington, Seattle Univ. of Washington, SeattleView Profile , Dani Lischinski Hebrew Univ. Hebrew Univ.View Profile , Richard Szeliski Microsoft Research Microsoft ResearchView Profile , David H. Salesin Univ. of Washington, Seattle Univ. of Washington, SeattleView Profile Authors Info & Claims SIGGRAPH '98: Proceedings of the 25th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniquesJuly 1998 Pages 75–84https://doi.org/10.1145/280814.280825Published:24 July 1998Publication History 446citation2,172DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations446Total Downloads2,172Last 12 Months71Last 6 weeks7 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF

Advances in network and processor technology have greatly changed the communication and computational power of local-area workstation clusters.However, operating systems still treat workstation clusters as a collection of loosely-connected processors,where each workstation acts as an autonomous and independent agent.This operating system structure makes it difficult to exploit the characteristics of current clusters, such as low-latency communication, huge primary memories, and high-speed processors, in order to improve the performance of cluster applications.This paper describes the design and implementation of global memory management in a workstation cluster.Our objective is to use a single, unified, but distributed memory management algorithm at the lowest level of the operating system.By managing memory globally at this level, all system-and higher-level software, including VM, file systems, transaction systems, and user applications, can benefit from available cluster memory.We have implemented our algorithm in the OSF/1 operating system running on an ATM-connected cluster of DEC Alpha workstations.Our measurements show that on a suite of memory-intensive programs, our system improves performance by a factor of 1.5 to 3.5.We also show that our algorithm has a performance advantage over others that have been proposed in the past.