high performance computing on graphics processing units: hgpu.org

The introduction of floating-point pixel shaders has initiated a trend of moving algorithms from CPUs to graphics cards. The first algorithms were in the rendering domain, but recently we have witnessed increased interest in modeling algorithms as well. In this paper we present techniques for generating subdivision curves on a modern Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). […]

We describe a system for the texture-based direct volume visualization of large data sets on a PC cluster equipped with GPUs. The data is partitioned into volume bricks in object space, and the intermediate images are combined to a final picture in a sort-last approach. Hierarchical wavelet compression is applied to increase the effective size […]

Animated crowds are effective to increase realism in virtual reality applications. However, rendering crowds requires large computational power. In this paper, we present a technique suitable to render large crowds of characters that takes advantage of existing programmable graphics hardware. Impostors are used for low-detail representation, while pseudo-instancing is used for higher detail. A LOD […]

The computation of high-fidelity images in real-time remains one of the key challenges for computer graphics. Recent work has shown that by understanding the human visual system, selective rendering may be used to render only those parts to which the human viewer is attending at high quality and the rest of the scene at a […]

This paper presents a new GPU-based tensor voting implementation which achieves significant performance improvement over the conventional CPU-based implementation. Although the tensor voting framework has been used for many vision problems, it is computationally very intensive when the number of input tokens is very large. However, the fact that each token independently collects votes allows […]

This paper investigates the problem of object surface reflectance modeling, which is sometimes referred to as inverse reflectometry, for photorealistic rendering and effective multimedia applications. A number of methods have been developed for estimating object surface reflectance properties in order to render real objects under arbitrary illumination conditions. However, it is still difficult to densely […]

In the past, graphics processors were special purpose hardwired application accelerators, suitable only for conventional rasterization-style graphics applications. Modern GPUs are now fully programmable, massively parallel floating point processors. This talk will describe NVIDIA’s massively multithreaded computing architecture and CUDA software for GPU computing. The architecture is a scalable, highly parallel architecture that delivers high […]

In this paper, a new technique is presented for interactive rendering of caustics fully processed on GPU. Without any pre-computation required, the algorithm can directly render refractive caustics from complex deformable transparent objects onto an opaque receiver surface. By the technique we accurately trace the path of the photons and calculate the energy carried by […]

In this paper, a low-power GPU architecture is described for the handheld systems with limited power and area budgets. The GPU is designed using logarithmic arithmetic for power- and area-efficient design. For this GPU, a multifunction unit is proposed based on the hybrid number system of floating-point and logarithmic numbers and the matrix, vector, and […]

Over the past years, the interaction between humans and computers (HCI) evolved to one of the most important research topics in computer science. Therefore, finding a way for an intuitive, easy and affordable interaction is the main challenge. Optical markerless tracking using consumer hardware can satisfy these problems. However, in order to be able to […]

Autostereoscopic displays enable unencumbered immersive virtual reality, but at a significant computational expense. This expense impacts the feasibility of autostereo displays in high-performance real-time interactive applications. A new autostereo rendering algorithm named autostereo combiner addresses this problem using the programmable vertex and fragment pipelines of modern graphics processing units (GPUs). This algorithm is applied to […]

Natural mountains and valleys are gradually eroded by rainfall and river flows. Physically-based modeling of this complex phenomenon is a major concern in producing realistic synthesized terrains. However, despite some recent improvements, existing algorithms are still computationally expensive, leading to a time-consuming process fairly impractical for terrain designers and 3D artists. In this paper, we […]