These latest years witnessed an impressive improvement of graphics hardware both in terms of feat... more These latest years witnessed an impressive improvement of graphics hardware both in terms of features and in terms of computational power. This improvement can be easily observed in computer games, where effects which, until few years ago, could only be achieved with expensive CPU computation are now shown interactively. Although the GPU has been designed for implementing graphics effects, it is still it basically a processing unit with its own memory, and, being specialized for algebraic tasks, supplies a number of floating point operations per second which is orders of magnitude greater than the CPU. This suggested to the graphics community that the GPU could also be used for general purpose computation and a number of papers have been published on how to hack the GPU to this target. Following this trend we propose a framework for using GPU for implementing techniques for deformable objects represented as generic meshes. The framework only assumes than the global computation is th...
We present a state-of-the-art system for obtaining and exploring large scale three-dimensional mo... more We present a state-of-the-art system for obtaining and exploring large scale three-dimensional models of urban landscapes. A multimodal approach to reconstruction fuses cadastral information, laser range data, and oblique imagery into building models, which are then refined by applying procedural rules for replacing textures with 3D elements, such as windows and doors, therefore enhancing the model quality and adding semantics to the model. For city scale exploration, these detailed models are uploaded to a web-based service, which automatically constructs an approximate scalable multiresolution representation. This representation can be interactively transmitted and visualized over the net to clients ranging from graphics PCs to web-enabled portable devices. The approach's characteristics and performance are illustrated using real-world city-scale data.
We introduce a novel efficient technique for automatically transforming a generic renderable 3D s... more We introduce a novel efficient technique for automatically transforming a generic renderable 3D scene into a simple graph representation named ExploreMaps, where nodes are nicely placed point of views, called probes, and arcs are smooth paths between neighboring probes. Each probe is associated with a panoramic image enriched with preferred viewing orientations, and each path with a panoramic video. Our GPU‐accelerated unattended construction pipeline distributes probes so as to guarantee coverage of the scene while accounting for perceptual criteria before finding smooth, good looking paths between neighboring probes. Images and videos are precomputed at construction time with off‐line photorealistic rendering engines, providing a convincing 3D visualization beyond the limits of current real‐time graphics techniques. At run‐time, the graph is exploited both for creating automatic scene indexes and movie previews of complex scenes and for supporting interactive exploration through a...
Virtual reality, archeology, and cultural heritage, 2009
We focus on developing a simple and efficient unified level-of-detail structure for networked urb... more We focus on developing a simple and efficient unified level-of-detail structure for networked urban model viewers. At the core of our approach is a revisitation of the BlockMap (CDG�07) data structure, originally introduced for encoding coarse representations of blocks of buildings to be used as direction-independent impostors when ren- dering far-away city blocks. The contribution of this paper is manifold:
These latest years witnessed an impressive improvement of graphics hardware both in terms of feat... more These latest years witnessed an impressive improvement of graphics hardware both in terms of features and in terms of computational power. This improvement can be easily observed in computer games, where effects which, until few years ago, could only be achieved with expensive CPU computation are now shown interactively. Although the GPU has been designed for implementing graphics effects, it is still it basically a processing unit with its own memory, and, being specialized for algebraic tasks, supplies a number of floating point operations per second which is orders of magnitude greater than the CPU. This suggested to the graphics community that the GPU could also be used for general purpose computation and a number of papers have been published on how to hack the GPU to this target. Following this trend we propose a framework for using GPU for implementing techniques for deformable objects represented as generic meshes. The framework only assumes than the global computation is th...
We present a state-of-the-art system for obtaining and exploring large scale three-dimensional mo... more We present a state-of-the-art system for obtaining and exploring large scale three-dimensional models of urban landscapes. A multimodal approach to reconstruction fuses cadastral information, laser range data, and oblique imagery into building models, which are then refined by applying procedural rules for replacing textures with 3D elements, such as windows and doors, therefore enhancing the model quality and adding semantics to the model. For city scale exploration, these detailed models are uploaded to a web-based service, which automatically constructs an approximate scalable multiresolution representation. This representation can be interactively transmitted and visualized over the net to clients ranging from graphics PCs to web-enabled portable devices. The approach's characteristics and performance are illustrated using real-world city-scale data.
We introduce a novel efficient technique for automatically transforming a generic renderable 3D s... more We introduce a novel efficient technique for automatically transforming a generic renderable 3D scene into a simple graph representation named ExploreMaps, where nodes are nicely placed point of views, called probes, and arcs are smooth paths between neighboring probes. Each probe is associated with a panoramic image enriched with preferred viewing orientations, and each path with a panoramic video. Our GPU‐accelerated unattended construction pipeline distributes probes so as to guarantee coverage of the scene while accounting for perceptual criteria before finding smooth, good looking paths between neighboring probes. Images and videos are precomputed at construction time with off‐line photorealistic rendering engines, providing a convincing 3D visualization beyond the limits of current real‐time graphics techniques. At run‐time, the graph is exploited both for creating automatic scene indexes and movie previews of complex scenes and for supporting interactive exploration through a...
Virtual reality, archeology, and cultural heritage, 2009
We focus on developing a simple and efficient unified level-of-detail structure for networked urb... more We focus on developing a simple and efficient unified level-of-detail structure for networked urban model viewers. At the core of our approach is a revisitation of the BlockMap (CDG�07) data structure, originally introduced for encoding coarse representations of blocks of buildings to be used as direction-independent impostors when ren- dering far-away city blocks. The contribution of this paper is manifold:
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Papers by Fabio Ganovelli