Research Overview

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We are currently doing research in the following areas of Computer Graphics:
• Modeling and Visualization of Complex Graphical Environments
  • Raytracing Complex Three-dimensional Scenes
  • Terrain and Urban Modeling
  • View-dependent Refinement
  • Stereoscopic Visualization
• Crowd Simulation
  • Path Planning
  • Psychological and Sociological Factors
  • Emergency Crowd Simulation
• Physically-Based Modeling and Animation
  • Deformable Models
  • Human Modeling and Animation
  • Facial Animation

We have been working on developing techniques for the realistic modeling and rendering of complex geometric environments, including massive three-dimensional scenes with a large number of polygons, terrain height fields and urban models. Currently, we investigate ray tracing and path tracing algorithms that utilizes the tetrahedral mesh of the empty space between the objects in the 3D scene to be rendered for fast ray-surface intersections. In order to further increase the rendering performance, we will investigate different data structures and data layouts. We also investigate the parallelization of the proposed techniques using CPU and GPU.

Previously, we developed algorithms for stereoscopic view-dependent visualization of terrain height fields. We proposed a slice-wise representation for buildings, which is a data structure that stores buildings using axis-aligned slices, and exploited this representation to develop an occlusion culling algorithm for urban areas. Slicewise representation brings significant computational and storage gains.

We also investigate various aspects of crowd simulation, such as impact of personality models on crowd behavior, path planning and modeling crowd behavior in emergency situations.