Oliver Mattausch

• PhD
• Software Engineer at Siemens PLM, Vienna, Austria

Numerical simulation of ultrasound images can facilitate the training of sonographers. An efficient and realistic model for the simulation of ultrasonic speckle is the convolution of the ultrasound point-spread function with a distribution of point scatterers. Nevertheless, for a given arbitrary tissue type, a scatterer map that would generate a re...

Ray-based simulations have been shown to generate impressively realistic ultrasound images in interactive frame rates. Recent efforts used GPU-based surface raytracing to simulate complex ultrasound interactions such as multiple reflections and refractions. These methods are restricted to perfectly specular reflections (i.e. following only a single...

Purpose: 4D ultrasound imaging of the fetal heart relies on reconstructions from B-mode images. In the presence of fetal motion, current approaches suffer from artifacts, which are unrecoverable for single sweeps. Methods: We propose to use many sweeps and exploit the resulting redundancy to automatically recover from motion by reconstructing a...

PurposeEffectiveness of image-guided radiation therapy with precise dose delivery depends highly on accurate target localization, which may involve motion during treatment due to, e.g., breathing and drift. Therefore, it is important to track the motion and adjust the radiation delivery accordingly. Tracking generally requires reliable target appea...

Navigation and interpretation of ultrasound (US) images require substantial expertise, the training of which can be aided by virtual-reality simulators. However, a major challenge in creating plausible simulated US images is the generation of realistic ultrasound speckle. Since typical ultrasound speckle exhibits many properties of Markov Random F...

4D ultrasound imaging of the fetal heart relies on reconstructions from B-mode images. In the presence of fetal or mother's motion, current approaches su�er from artifacts. We propose to use many sweeps and exploit the resulting redundancy to recover from motion by reconstructing a 4D image which is consistent in phase, space and time. We �rst quan...

Reconstructing the as-built architectural shape of building interiors has emerged in recent years as an important and challenging research problem. An effective approach must be able to faithfully capture the architectural structures and separate permanent components from clutter (e.g. furniture), while at the same time dealing with defects in the...

Reconstructing the as-built architectural shape of building interiors has emerged in recent years as an important and challenging research problem. An effective approach must be able to faithfully capture the architectural structures and separate permanent components from clutter (e.g. furniture), while at the same time dealing with defects in the...

a) Embryo surface model (b) Deterministic ray-tracing (c) Monte-Carlo ray-tracing (d) Actual in-vivo US image Figure 1: Comparison of deterministic binary ray-tracing (b) with our Monte-Carlo method (c) for ultrasound (US) simulation of pregnancy with a surface-based embryo model of 255K triangles (a). Note that the in-vivo embryo (d) is at slightl...

Numerical simulation of ultrasound images can facilitate the training of sonographers. A realistic appearance of simulated ultrasonic speckle is essential for a plausible ultrasound simulation. An efficient and realistic model for ultrasonic speckle is the convolution of the ultrasound point-spread function with a parametrized distribution of point...

We propose a new technique for GPU ray tracing using a generalization of hierarchical occlusion culling in the style of the CHC++ method. Our method exploits the rasterization pipeline and hardware occlusion queries in order to create coherent batches of work for localized shader-based ray-tracing kernels. By combining hierarchies in both ray space...

We present a robust approach for reconstructing the main architectural structure of complex indoor environments given a set of cluttered 3D input range scans. Our method uses an efficient occlusion-aware process to extract planar patches as candidate walls, separating them from clutter and coping with missing data, and automatically extracts the in...

With better and faster acquisition devices comes a demand for fast robust reconstruction algorithms, but no L1-based technique has been fast enough for online use so far. In this paper, we present a novel continuous formulation of the weighted locally optimal projection (WLOP) operator based on a Gaussian mixture describing the input point density....

We present a method to automatically segment indoor scenes by detecting repeated objects. Our algorithm scales to datasets with 198 million points and does not require any training data. We propose a trivially parallelizable preprocessing step, which compresses a point cloud into a collection of nearly-planar patches related by geometric transforma...

We performed a perceptual user study of algorithms that approximate soft shadows in real time. While a huge body of soft-shadow algorithms have been proposed, to our knowledge this is the first methodical study for comparing different real-time shadow algorithms with respect to their plausibility and visual appearance. We evaluated soft-shadow prop...

Reconstructing the architectural shape of interiors is a problem that is gaining increasing attention in the field of computer graphics. Some solutions have been proposed in recent years, but cluttered environments with multiple rooms and non-vertical walls still represent a challenge for state-of-the-art methods. We propose an occlusions-aware pip...

We present a method to automatically segment indoor scenes by detecting repeated objects. Our algorithm scales to datasets with 198 million points and does not require any training data. We propose a trivially parallelizable preprocessing step, which compresses a point cloud into a collection of nearly-planar patches related by geometric transform...

We present a robust approach for reconstructing the architectural structure of complex indoor environments given a set of cluttered input scans. Our method first uses an efficient occlusion-aware process to extract planar patches as candidate walls, separating them from clutter and coping with missing data. Using a diffusion process to further incr...

We present an algorithm for artistically modifying physically based shadows. With our tool, an artist can directly edit the shadow boundaries in the scene in an intuitive fashion similar to freeform curve editing. Our algorithm then makes these shadow edits consistent with respect to varying light directions and scene configurations, by creating a...

In offline rendering the algorithm of choice for correctly shadowing transparent objects such as hair or smoke are emphdeep shadow maps. Algorithms trying to achieve the same effect in real-time have hitherto always been limited to approximating the solution by depth-peeling techniques. Since the introduction of Direct3D 11, however, it has become...

Nowadays, there is a strong trend towards rendering to higher-resolution displays and at high frame rates. This development aims at delivering more detail and better accuracy, but it also comes at a significant cost. Although graphics cards continue to evolve with an ever-increasing amount of computational power, the speed gain is easily counteract...

Physically accurate soft shadows in 3D applications can be simulated by taking multiple samples from all over the area light source and accumulating them. Due to the unpredictability of the size of the penumbra regions, the required sampling density has to be high in order to guarantee smooth shadow transitions in all cases. Hence, several hundreds...

In this paper we present a novel plausible rendering method for mixed reality systems, which is useful for many real-life application scenarios, like architecture, product visualization or edutainment. To allow virtual objects to seamlessly blend into the real environment, the real lighting conditions and the mutual illumination effects between rea...

We propose an efficient and light-weight solution for rendering smooth shadow boundaries that do not reveal the tessellation of the shadow-casting geometry. Our algorithm reconstructs the smooth contours of the underlying mesh and then extrudes shadow volumes from the smooth silhouettes to render the shadows. For this purpose we propose an improved...

Standard online occlusion culling is able to vastly improve the rasterization performance of walkthrough applications by identifying large parts of the scene as invisible from the camera and rendering only the visible geometry. However, it is of little use for the acceleration of shadow map generation (i.e., rasterizing the scene from the light vie...

Standard online occlusion culling is able to vastly improve the rasterization performance of walkthrough applications by identifying large parts of the scene as invisible from the camera and rendering only the visible geometry. However, it is of little use for the acceleration of shadow map generation (i.e., rasterizing the scene from the light vie...

We propose a novel method for efficient construction of shadow maps by culling shadow casters which do not contribute to visible shadows. The method uses a mask of potential shadow receivers to cull shadow casters using a hierarchical occlusion culling algorithm. We propose several variants of the receiver mask implementations with different cullin...

Nowadays, there is a strong trend towards rendering to higher-resolution displays and at high frame rates. This development aims at delivering more detail and better accuracy, but it also comes at a significant cost. Although graphics cards continue to evolve with an ever-increasing amount of computational power, the processing gain is counteracted...

Ambient occlusion is a cheap but effective approximation of global illumination. Recently, screen-space ambient occlusion (SSAO) methods, which sample the frame buffer as a discretization of the scene geometry, have become very popular for real-time rendering. We present temporal SSAO (TSSAO), a new algorithm which exploits temporal coherence to pr...

In this paper we present a novel plausible realistic rendering method for mixed reality systems, which is useful for many real life application scenarios, like architecture, product visualization or edutainment. To allow virtual objects to seamlessly blend into the real environment, the real lighting conditions and the mutual illumination effects b...

Visibility computations are essential operations in computer graphics, which are required for rendering acceleration in the form of visibility culling, as well as for computing realistic lighting. Visibility culling, which is the main focus of this thesis, aims to provide output sensitivity by sending only visible primitives to the hardware. Regard...

Temporal coherence (TC), the correlation of contents between adjacent rendered frames, exists across a wide range of scenes and motion types in practical real-time rendering. By taking advantage of TC, we can save redundant computation and improve the performance of many rendering tasks significantly with only a marginal decrease in quality. This n...

A vast amount of soft shadow map algorithms have been presented in recent years. Most use a single sample hard shadow map together with some clever filtering technique to calculate perceptually or even physically plausible soft shadows. On the other hand there is the class of much slower algorithms that calculate physically correct soft shadows by...

In this paper we propose a global visibility algorithm which computes from-region visibility for all view cells simultaneously in a progressive manner. We cast rays to sample visibility interactions and use the information carried by a ray for all view cells it intersects. The main contribution of the paper is a set of adaptive sampling strategies...

This article presents a method which minimizes the overhead associated with occlusion queries. The method reduces the number of required state changes and should integrate easily with most game engines. The key ideas are batching of the queries and interfacing with the game engine using a dedicated render queue. We also present some additional opti...

We present a new algorithm for efficient occlusion culling using hardware occlusion queries. The algorithm significantly improves on previous techniques by making better use of temporal and spatial coherence of visibility. This is achieved by using adaptive visibility prediction and query batching. As a result of the new optimizations the number of...

This paper describes a new tool for preprocessed visibility. It puts together view space and object space partitioning in order to control the render cost and memory cost of the visibility description gen- erated by a visibility solver. The presented method progressively refines view space and object space subdivisions while minimiz- ing the associ...

We present a new method for the automatic partitioning of view space into a multi-level view cell hierarchy. We use a cost-based model in order to minimize the average rendering time. Unlike previous methods, our model takes into account the actual visibility in the scene, and the partition is not restricted to planes given by the scene geometry. W...

It is well known in the signal-processing community that the Body-Centered Cubic grid is the optimal sampling grid in 3D. In volume visualization, the Cartesian grid is by far the most popular type of grid because it is convenient to handle. But it requires 29.3% more samples than the Body-Centered Cubic grid. In order to convince people used to Ca...

This paper presents several strategies to interactively explore 3D flow. Based on a fast illuminated streamlines algorithm, standard graphics hardware is sufficient to gain interactive rendering rates. Our approach does not require the user to have any prior knowledge of flow features. After the streamlines are computed in a short preprocessing tim...

The body-centered cubic (BCC) grid has received attention in the volume visualization community recently due to its ability to represent the same data with almost 30% fewer samples as compared to the Cartesian cubic (CC) grid. In this paper we present several resampling strategies for raycasting BCC grids. These strategies range from 2D interpolati...

The body-centered cubic (BCC) grid has received attention in the volume visualization community recently due to its ability to rep-resent the same data with almost 30% fewer samples as compared to the Cartesian cubic (CC) grid. In this paper we present several resampling strategies for raycasting BCC grids. These strategies range from 2D interpolat...