Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

International Initiatives

INRIA Associate Teams

CIPRUS

• Title: Challenges in Photorealistic Rendering

• INRIA principal investigator: Nicolas Holzschuch

• International Partner:

  • Institution: Cornell University (United States)

  • Laboratory: Program of Computer Graphics Cornell University

• International Partner:

  • Institution: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (United States)

  • Laboratory: Computer graphics group CSAIL Lab

• Duration: 2009 - 2011

• See also: http://artis.imag.fr/Projets/Cornell-EA/ Photorealistic rendering deals with the production of pictures of virtual worlds that are as close as possible to what a real photograph of this virtual world would look like. Considerable progress has been made in recent years, and photorealistic pictures are being used in severa sectors of the industry: virtual prototyping, special effects for motion picture, video games... However, truly photorealistic pictures of a virtual world are still difficult to get. There are multiple difficulties to overcome: model acquisition, model representation, scalability, sampling and perceptual issues. Our goal in this project is to address all these issues simultaneously, targetting the production of high-quality photographic like pictures that are capable of passing a "Turing-test": they are impossible to separate from photographs of the real world, with all its complexity.

  Our goal in this project is to address the many hard challenges remaining in Photorealistic Rendering, especially dealing with the inclusion of real-world objects in virtual scenes and modelling complex materials, such as low-order scattering or high-reflectance materials. The challenges we selected have two points in common: they're regarded as difficult research challenges, and they would greatly enhance the realism of the pictures generated. Both teams stand to gain from a joint work in this area. This joint work should result in several scientific breakthroughs, with the production of photorealistic pictures of highly complex virtual worlds.

Visits of International Scientists

• Professor Charles Hansen has started in November 2011 a visit of six month in the ARTIS team. His six-months visit is funded by the University of Grenoble. Charles D. Hansen received a BS in computer science from Memphis State University in 1981 and a PhD in computer science from the University of Utah in 1987. He is a professor of computer science at the University of Utah an associate director of the SCI Institute. From 1989 to 1997, he was a Technical Staff Member in the Advanced Computing Laboratory (ACL) located at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he formed and directed the visualization efforts in the ACL. He was a Bourse de Chateaubriand PostDoc Fellow at INRIA, Rocquencourt France, in 1987 and 1988. His research interests include large-scale scientific visualization and computer graphics.

• Professor Vijay Natarajan visits the ARTIS and EVASION teams for one month in november 2011. Following a visit of G.-P. Bonneau and S. Hahmann (from EVASION), in february 2010, he collaborated with these two faculties on the topic of topology-based visualization algorithms. A common paper was already pubished by these authors at IEEE TVCG in 2010. Vijay Natarajan is an professor in the Department of Computer Science and Automation and the Supercomputer Education and Research Centre at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He received the Ph.D. degree in computer science from Duke University in 2004 and holds the B.E. degree in computer science and M.Sc. degree in mathematics from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India. His research interests include scientific visualization, computational geometry, computational topology, and meshing.