Rendering and modeling complex scenes is challenging. Understanding and exploiting how humans perceive complex scenes is an important area in graphics. We have worked on multiple projects in this area.

Understanding how we perceive complex geometric aggregates is an open problem. We study the perception of aggregates to derive metrics for scene simplification (SIG '08).

Aggregate Perception Project page

Visual Equivalence Project page

Rendering high complexity scenes including complex illumination and rendering effects such as motion blur, participating media, global illumination, and depth-of-field, is challenging. Multidimensional lightcuts (SIG '06) and lightcuts (SIG '05) present a unified, scalable rendering framework to efficiently render complex scenes with such effects. By unifying complex illumination into one framework we achieve high scalability and accurate imagery.

Multidimensional Lightcuts Project page

Lightcuts Project page

Direct-to-Indirect Light Transport Project page

When a user changes the scene (but not the lighting), rapidly identifying the parts of the radiance computation that are affected by user manipulation is difficult. 5D Ray Segment Trees (EGRW '99) efficiently identify affected radiance interpolants and incrementally ray trace images.

Ray segment trees Project page

The human visual system is sensitive to features such as silhouettes and shadows.

Edge-and-point rendering (SIG '03) identifies visually important features (edges) and combines them with sparse, expensive shading samples to achieve interactive rendering with global illumination. This approach bridges the gap between expensive, high-quality rendering and fast, interactive display. Project page, GPU implementation project page (GI '06)

Feature-based textures (EGSR '04) are a resolution-independent representation of textures that capture visually important features. FBT Project page

Detail synthesis (I3D '03) adds visually plausible detail to textures created by image-based modeling. This approach identifies areas of poor detail in extracted textures and automatically creates higher resolution detail for uniformly high-quality textures.
Project page

Constrained Minimization Synthesis (TVCG '06) casts detail synthesis and image analogies as an energy minimization problem, and uses graph cut techniques to synthesize textures while satisfying constraints.
Project page

Adaptive shadow maps (SIG '01) address the fundamental problem of shadow map aliasing by adaptively changing shadow map resolution based on viewpoint. ASM Project page

Local illumination environments (EGSR '02) capture the part of the environment that influences shading at each part of a scene. This approach enables rendering with complex direct illumination including hundreds of lights. LIE Project page

Iterative adaptive sampling (TVCG '06) efficiently renders scenes with many lights by adapting the sampling distribution of the lights in a multipass algorithm.