PhD thesis: Joint treatment of geometry and radiance for 3D model digitisation

PhD thesis: Kenneth VANHOEY

Team: IGG

Title: Joint treatment of geometry and radiance for 3D model digitisation

Abstract: Vision and computer graphics communities have built methods for digitizing, processing and rendering 3D objects. There is an increasing demand coming from cultural communities for these technologies, especially for archiving, remote studying and restoring cultural artefacts like statues, buildings or caves. Besides digitizing geometry, there can be a demand for recovering the photometry with more or less complexity : simple textures (2D), light fields (4D), SV-BRDF (6D), etc. In this thesis, we present steady solutions for constructing and treating surface light fields represented by hemispherical radiance functions attached to the surface in real-world on-site conditions. First, we tackle the algorithmic reconstruction-phase of defining these functions based on photographic acquisitions from several viewpoints in real-world "on-site" conditions. That is, the photographic sampling may be unstructured and very sparse or noisy. We propose a process for deducing functions in a manner that is robust and generates a surface light field that may vary from "expected" and artefact-less to high quality, depending on the uncontrolled conditions. Secondly, a mesh simplification algorithm is guided by a new metric that measures quality loss both in terms of geometry and radiance. Finally, we propose a GPU-compatible radiance interpolation algorithm that allows for coherent radiance interpolation over the mesh. This generates a smooth visualisation of the surface light field, even for poorly tessellated meshes. This is particularly suited for very simplified models.

This thesis was directed by Jean-Michel Dischler, professor at the University of Strasbourg and framed by Basile Sauvage, associate professor at the University of Strasbourg.

The presentation will take place on Tuesday February 18th at 2.00pm in room A207 of the Pôle API building in Illkirch.