High-Performance By-Example Noise using a Histogram-Preserving Blending Operator - Inria - Institut national de recherche en sciences et technologies du numérique
Journal Articles Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques Year : 2018

High-Performance By-Example Noise using a Histogram-Preserving Blending Operator

Eric Heitz
  • Function : Author
  • PersonId : 947452

Abstract

We propose a new by-example noise algorithm that takes as input a small example of a stochastic texture and synthesizes an infinite output with the same appearance. It works on any kind of random-phase inputs as well as on many non-random-phase inputs that are stochastic and non-periodic, typically natural textures such as moss, granite, sand, bark, etc. Our algorithm achieves high-quality results comparable to state-of-the-art procedural-noise techniques but is more than 20 times faster. Our approach is conceptually simple: we partition the output texture space on a triangle grid and associate each vertex with a random patch from the input such that the evaluation inside a triangle is done by blending 3 patches. The key to this approach is the blending operation that usually produces visual artifacts such as ghosting, softened discontinuities and reduced contrast, or introduces new colors not present in the input. We analyze these problems by showing how linear blending impacts the histogram and show that a blending operator that preserves the histogram prevents these problems. The main requirement for a rendering application is to implement such an operator in a fragment shader without further post-processing, i.e. we need a histogram-preserving blending operator that operates only at the pixel level. Our insight for the design of this operator is that, with Gaussian inputs, histogram-preserving blending boils down to mean and variance preservation, which is simple to obtain analytically. We extend this idea to non-Gaussian inputs by "Gaussianizing" them with a histogram transformation and "de-Gaussianizing" them with the inverse transformation after the blending operation. We show how to precompute and store these histogram transformations such that our algorithm can be implemented in a fragment shader.
Fichier principal
Vignette du fichier
HPN2018.pdf (41.39 Mo) Télécharger le fichier
HPG2018_ByExampleNoise-slides.pdf (92.37 Mo) Télécharger le fichier
HPG2018_ByExampleNoise-slides_no-notes.pdf (92.22 Mo) Télécharger le fichier
HPN2018_supplemental.pdf (111.01 Mo) Télécharger le fichier
HPN_fullvideo.zip (36.01 Mo) Télécharger le fichier
Origin Files produced by the author(s)
Loading...

Dates and versions

hal-01824773 , version 1 (27-06-2018)

Identifiers

Cite

Eric Heitz, Fabrice Neyret. High-Performance By-Example Noise using a Histogram-Preserving Blending Operator. Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, 2018, ACM SIGGRAPH / Eurographics Symposium on High-Performance Graphics 2018, 1 (2), pp.Article No. 31:1-25. ⟨10.1145/3233304⟩. ⟨hal-01824773⟩
1882 View
5548 Download

Altmetric

Share

More