Shadows contribute significantly to the perceived realism of an image, and provide an important depth cue. Rendering high quality, antialiased shadows efficiently is a difficult problem. To antialias shadows, it is necessary to compute partial visibilities, but computing these visibilities using existing approaches is often too slow for interactive applications. Shadow maps are a widely used technique for real-time shadow rendering. One major drawback of shadow maps is aliasing, because the shadow map data cannot be filtered in the same way as colour textures. In this thesis, I present variance shadow maps (VSMs). Variance shadow maps use a linear representation of the depth distributions in the shadow map, which enables the use of standard linear texture filtering algorithms. Thus VSMs can address the problem of shadow aliasing using the same highly-tuned mechanisms that are available for colour images. Given the mean and variance of the depth distribution, Chebyshev's inequality provides an upper bound on the fraction of a shaded fragment that is occluded, and I show that this bound often provides a good approximation to the true partial occlusion. For more difficult cases, I show that warping the depth distribution can produce multiple bounds, some tighter than others. Based on this insight, I present layered variance shadow maps, a scalable generalization of variance shadow maps that partitions the depth distribution into multiple segments. This reduces or eliminates an artifact - "light bleeding" - that can appear when using the simpler version of variance shadow maps. Additionally, I demonstrate exponential variance shadow maps, which combine moments computed from two exponentially-warped depth distributions. Using this approach, high quality results are produced at a fraction of the storage cost of layered variance shadow maps. These algorithms are easy to implement on current graphics hardware and provide efficient, scalable solutions to the problem of shadow map aliasing.

Shadows contribute significantly to the perceived realism of an image, and provide an important depth cue. Rendering high quality, antialiased shadows efficiently is a difficult problem. To antialias shadows, it is necessary to compute partial visibilities, but computing these visibilities using existing approaches is often too slow for interactive applications. Shadow maps are a widely used technique for real-time shadow rendering. One major drawback of shadow maps is aliasing, because the shadow map data cannot be filtered in the same way as colour textures. In this thesis, I present variance shadow maps (VSMs). Variance shadow maps use a linear representation of the depth distributions in the shadow map, which enables the use of standard linear texture filtering algorithms. Thus VSMs can address the problem of shadow aliasing using the same highly-tuned mechanisms that are available for colour images. Given the mean and variance of the depth distribution, Chebyshev's inequality provides an upper bound on the fraction of a shaded fragment that is occluded, and I show that this bound often provides a good approximation to the true partial occlusion. For more difficult cases, I show that warping the depth distribution can produce multiple bounds, some tighter than others. Based on this insight, I present layered variance shadow maps, a scalable generalization of variance shadow maps that partitions the depth distribution into multiple segments. This reduces or eliminates an artifact - "light bleeding" - that can appear when using the simpler version of variance shadow maps. Additionally, I demonstrate exponential variance shadow maps, which combine moments computed from two exponentially-warped depth distributions. Using this approach, high quality results are produced at a fraction of the storage cost of layered variance shadow maps. These algorithms are easy to implement on current graphics hardware and provide efficient, scalable solutions to the problem of shadow map aliasing.

This report documents implementation details, results, benchmarks and technical discussions for the work carried out within a master’s thesis at Linköping University. Within the master’s thesis, the field of software rendering is explored in the age of parallel computing. Using the Open Computing Language, a complete graphics pipeline was implemented for use on general processing units from different vendors. The pipeline is tile-based, fully-configurable and provides means of rendering visually compelling images in real-time. Yet, further optimizations for parallel architectures are needed as uneven work loads drastically decrease the overall performance of the pipeline.

Made available in DSpace on 2015-03-05T13:58:27Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 26 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / Inpainting Digital é uma técnica recente que permite completar a falta de informação em imagens, seja por falha ou por remoção intencional de alguma área ou objeto. Uma das atribuições importantes do inpainting digital é de que deve ser capaz de alterar uma imagem, de forma que não seja simples perceber que esta alteração foi feita; caracteriza uma modificação indetectável. Os métodos para determinar como esta falta de informação será preenchida variam desde a criação do primeiro modelo de inpainting digital. Contudo, sempre deve ser mantida uma coerência no preenchimento, que fará com que a região preenchida automaticamente aparente como parte da imagem verdadeira. As técnicas atuais tratam este preenchimento como uma propagação da estrutura da área que está ao redor da região a ser preenchida, trabalhando diretamente no domímio das cores, utilizando abordagens como Variação Total e Equações Diferenciais Parciais. Neste trabalho, é feito o uso de transformada Wavelet para a aplicação de inpainting digita / Digital Inpainting is a recent techinique that allows the filling of missing information in images. One important attribute of a digital inpainting technique is the ability of altering an image in such a way that it is not simple for the human observer to detect the modification, characterizing an undetectable modification. The strategies for filling missing parts vary since the first inpainting model, but one thing that remains is the fact that the filled area must be coherent with the original part of the image. Current techniques handle the filling as a structure propagation problem, working directly in the image color domain, and based on concepts like Total Variation or Partial Diferential Equations. In this work, we present a digital inpainting model that works exclusively in Wavelet domain,filling the target area with a texture synthesis mechanism using the properties of the Wavelet Transform