News of the Institute of Media Informatics

Two Papers accepted at Eurographics 2021 and Computer Graphics Forum

Ulm University

Enabling Viewpoint Learning through Dynamic Label Generation (Schelling et al.) | Blue Noise Plots (van Onzenoodt et al.)

Michael Schelling and Christian van Onzenoodt each have a publication at this year's EuroGraphics conference. These publications will later appear in the journal Computer Graphics Forum.
 

Enabling Viewpoint Learning through Dynamic Label Generation

Michael Schelling,  Pedro Hermosilla, Pere-Pau Vázquez, Timo Ropinski

Website

Abstract:

Optimal viewpoint prediction is an essential task in many computer graphicsapplications. Unfortunately, common viewpoint qualities suffer from majordrawbacks: dependency on clean surface meshes, which are not alwaysavailable, insensitivity to upright orientation, and the lack of closed-formexpressions, which requires a costly sampling process involving rendering.We overcome these limitations through a 3D deep learning approach, whichsolely exploits vertex coordinate information to predict optimal viewpointsunder upright orientation, while reflecting both informational content andhuman preference analysis. To enable this approach we propose a dynamiclabel generation strategy, which resolves inherent label ambiguities dur-ing training. In contrast to previous viewpoint prediction methods, whichevaluate many rendered views, we directly learn on the 3D mesh, and arethus independent from rendering. Furthermore, by exploiting unstructuredlearning, we are independent of mesh discretization. We show how the pro-posed technology enables learned prediction from model to viewpoints fordifferent object categories and viewpoint qualities. Additionally, we showthat prediction times are reduced from several minutes to a fraction of asecond, as compared to viewpoint quality evaluation. We will release thecode and training data, which will to our knowledge be the biggest viewpointquality dataset available.

 

Blue Noise Plots

Christian van Onzenoodt, Gurprit Singh, Timo Ropinski, Tobias Ritschel

Website

Abstract:

We propose Blue Noise Plots, two-dimensional dot plots that depict data points of univariate data sets. While often one-dimensional strip plots are used to depict such data, one of their main problems is visual clutter which results from overlap. To reduce this overlap, jitter plots were introduced, whereby an additional, non-encoding plot dimension is introduced, along which the data point representing dots are randomly perturbed. Unfortunately, this randomness can suggest non-existent clusters, and often leads to visually unappealing plots, in which overlap might still occur. To overcome these shortcomings, we introduce BlueNoise Plots where random jitter along the non-encoding plot dimension is replaced by optimizing all dots to keep a minimum distance in 2D i. e., Blue Noise. We evaluate the effectiveness as well as the aesthetics of Blue Noise Plots through both, a quantitative and a qualitative user study.