TR2000-10

Surfels: Surface Elements as Rendering Primitives


    •  Pfister, H., Zwicker, M., van Baar, J., Gross, M., "Surfels: Surface Elements as Rendering Primitives", ACM SIGGRAPH, July 2000, pp. 335-342.
      BibTeX TR2000-10 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Pfister2000jul,
      • author = {Pfister, H. and Zwicker, M. and {van Baar}, J. and Gross, M.},
      • title = {Surfels: Surface Elements as Rendering Primitives},
      • booktitle = {ACM SIGGRAPH},
      • year = 2000,
      • pages = {335--342},
      • month = jul,
      • isbn = {1-58113-208-5},
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2000-10}
      • }
  • Research Area:

    Computer Vision

Abstract:

Surface elements (surfels) are a powerful paradigm to efficiently render complex geometric objects at interactive frame rates. Unlike classical surface discretizations, i.e., triangles or quadrilateral meshes, surfels are point primitives without explicit connectivity. Surfel attributes comprise depth, texture color, normal, and others. As a pre-process, an octree-based surfel representation of a geometric object is computed. During sampling, surfel positions and normals are optionally perturbed, and different levels of texture colors are prefiltered and stored per surfel. During rendering, a hierarchical forward warping algorithm projects surfels to a z-buffer. A novel method called visibility splatting determines visible surfels and holes in the z-buffer. Visible surfels are shaded using texture filtering, Phong illumination, and environment mapping using per-surfel normals. Several methods of image reconstruction, including supersampling, offer flexible speed-quality tradeoffs. Due to the simplicity of the operations, the surfel rendering pipeline is amenable for hardware implementation. Surfel objects offer complex shape, low rendering cost and high image quality, which makes them specifically suited for low-cost, real-time graphics, such as games.

 

  • Related News & Events

    •  NEWS    ACM SIGGRAPH 2000: 5 publications by Hanspeter Pfister, Ron Perry, Matthew Brand, Jeroen van Baar and Ramesh Raskar
      Date: July 23, 2000
      Where: ACM SIGGRAPH
      MERL Contact: Matthew Brand
      Brief
      • The papers "Adaptively Sampled Distance Fields: A General Representation of Shape for Computer Graphics" by Frisken, S.F., Perry, R.N., Rockwood, A.P. and Jones, T.R., "Style Machines" by Brand, M.E. and Hertzmann, A., "Surfels: Surface Elements as Rendering Primitives" by Pfister, H., Zwicker, M., van Baar, J. and Gross, M., "Tangible Interactions and Graphical Interpretation: A New Approach to 3D Modeling" by Anderson, D., Frankel, J.L., Marks, J.W., Agarwala, A., Beardsley, P.A., Hodgins, J.K., Leigh, D.L., Ryall, K., Sullivan, E. and Yedidia, J.S. and "Image-Based Visual Hulls" by Matusik, W., Buehler, C., Raskar, R., Gortler, S.J. and McMillan, L. were presented at ACM SIGGRAPH.
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