160 results about "Geometric primitive" patented technology

In some arrangements, product packaging is digitally watermarked over most of its extent to facilitate high-throughput item identification at retail checkouts. Imagery captured by conventional or plenoptic cameras can be processed (e.g., by GPUs) to derive several different perspective-transformed views—further minimizing the need to manually reposition items for identification. Crinkles and other deformations in product packaging can be optically sensed, allowing such surfaces to be virtually flattened to aid identification. Piles of items can be 3D-modelled and virtually segmented into geometric primitives to aid identification, and to discover locations of obscured items. Other data (e.g., including data from sensors in aisles, shelves and carts, and gaze tracking for clues about visual saliency) can be used in assessing identification hypotheses about an item. A great variety of other features and arrangements are also detailed.

In some arrangements, product packaging is digitally watermarked over most of its extent to facilitate high-throughput item identification at retail checkouts. Imagery captured by conventional or plenoptic cameras can be processed (e.g., by GPUs) to derive several different perspective-transformed views—further minimizing the need to manually reposition items for identification. Crinkles and other deformations in product packaging can be optically sensed, allowing such surfaces to be virtually flattened to aid identification. Piles of items can be 3D-modelled and virtually segmented into geometric primitives to aid identification, and to discover locations of obscured items. Other data (e.g., including data from sensors in aisles, shelves and carts, and gaze tracking for clues about visual saliency) can be used in assessing identification hypotheses about an item. Logos may be identified and used—or ignored—in product identification. A great variety of other features and arrangements are also detailed.

A method and apparatus for creating motion blur, depth of field, and screen door effects when rendering three-dimensional graphics data are disclosed. A graphics system configured with a graphics processor, a super-sampled sample buffer, and a sample-to-pixel calculation unit is disclosed. The graphics processor may be configured to use a sample mask to select different subsets of sample coordinates to be rendered for a particular frame. Each subset may be rendered applying a different set of attributes, and the resulting samples may then be stored together in the sample buffer. The sample-to-pixel calculation unit may be configured to filter the samples into output pixels that are provided to a display device. The attributes that may be changed from subset to subset include the viewpoint, the time at which objects in the data are rendered, which objects or geometric primitives in the data are rendered, the position of objects in the data, the color of objects in the data, the transparency of objects in the data, and the shape of objects in the data.

A method and computer graphics system for clip testing using clip bits stored in a general-purpose register for each vertex of a geometric primitive. In one embodiment, a rendering unit or other processor sets bits in a clip bits register for each vertex of a geometric primitive. Each bit indicates whether the vertex is inside or outside of a clipping boundary with respect to a particular clipping plane. A frame buffer controller or other graphics processor performs clip testing on the entire geometric primitive by performing Boolean operations on the clip bits. The frame buffer controller may trivially accept or trivially reject the primitive based on the clip testing. If the primitive cannot be trivially rejected or trivially accepted, then the frame buffer controller sends an interrupt to the rendering unit. The rendering unit reads an exception register to determine that the reason for the interrupt is the need to clip the primitive. The rendering unit reads the vertices from the frame buffer controller, clips the primitive, and sends the new vertices to the frame buffer controller. The frame buffer controller clears the interrupt and resumes its graphics processing.

Different rendering techniques are selected for portions of a scene based on statistical estimates of the portions' rendering costs. A scene is partitioned into a bounding volume hierarchy. Each bounding volume includes a statistical model of the spatial distribution of geometric primitives within the bounding volume. An image to be rendered is partitioned into screen regions and each screen region is associated with one or more bounding volumes and their statistical models. The associated statistical models of a screen region are evaluated to estimate the rendering cost, such as the probable number of geometric primitives per pixel, for the screen region. Based on the rendering cost, the screen region is assigned to a dense geometry renderer, such as a ray tracing renderer, or a sparse geometry renderer, such as a rasterization renderer. Rendered screen regions are combined to form a rendered image.

A method, system, and computer-readable storage medium are disclosed for building ray tracing data structures for three-dimensional scenes. The methods may include accessing an initial data structure representing a coarse hierarchy of a scene geometry, e.g., a scene graph, and sorting elements of the initial data structure into multiple spatial partitions with respect to one or more splitting planes. The sorting may be dependent on spatial bounding ranges of non-leaf nodes of the initial data structure, which may be sorted without visiting the geometric primitives below. Sorting may be performed on pointers to elements of the initial data structure and may comprise a hierarchical quicksort. The resulting ray tracing data structure may comprise a k-dimensional tree, binary space partitioning tree, k-plane tree, bounding interval hierarchy, or fine-grained hierarchical bounding volume tree. The methods described herein may accelerate the building of ray tracing data structures for use in interactive graphics applications.

A graphics system and method for increasing efficiency of decompressing blocks of compressed geometry data and reducing redundant transformation and lighting calculations is disclosed. Multiple decompression pipelines are used to increases the decompression speed. A control unit receives blocks of compressed geometry data information and selectively routes them to a plurality of decompression pipelines. Each decompression pipeline is configured to decompress the blocks into a set of vertices. The reduction in redundant calculations is accomplished by delaying the formation of geometric primitives until after transformation and lighting has been performed on the vertices. Transformation and/or lighting are performed independently on a vertex-by-vertex basis without reference to which geometric primitives the vertices belong to. After transformation and or lighting, geometric primitives may be formed utilizing previously generated connectivity information. The connectivity information may include mesh buffer references, vertex tags, or other types of information.

A pose of an object is estimated by first defining a set of pair features as pairs of geometric primitives, wherein the geometric primitives include oriented surface points, oriented boundary points, and boundary line segments. Model pair features are determined based on the set of pair features for a model of the object. Scene pair features are determined based on the set of pair features from data acquired by a 3D sensor, and then the model pair features are matched with the scene pair features to estimate the pose of the object.

A method for segmenting a feature of interest from a volume image acquires image data elements from the image of a subject. One or more boundary points along a boundary of the feature of interest are identified according to one or more geometric primitives with reference to the displayed view. A foreground seed curve is defined according to the one or more identified boundary points. A background field array that lies outside of, and is spaced from, the foreground seed curve by a predetermined distance, is defined. Segmentation is applied to the volume image according to foreground values obtained according to image data elements that are spatially bounded on or within the foreground seed curve and according to background field array values to create a segmented feature of interest.

The VPC unit and setup unit of a graphics processing subsystem perform culling operations. The VPC unit performs culling operations on geometric primitives falling within a specific criteria, such as having a property within of a numerical range limit. This limit reduces the complexity of the VPC unit. As increasing rendering complexity typically produces a large number of small primitives, the VPC unit culls many primitives despite its limitations. The VPC unit also includes a cache for storing previously processed vertices in their transformed form, along with previously computed culling information. This increases the VPC unit throughput by reducing the number of memory accesses and culling operations to be performed. The setup unit performs culling operations on any general primitive that cannot be culled by the VPC unit. By performing a first series of culling operations in the VPC unit, the processing burden on the setup unit is decreased.

A system for providing substantially stable haptics includes at least one computer configured to identify a first subset and a second subset of haptic interaction geometric primitives for a virtual tool. The computer is configured to determine based on the first subset, haptic forces in a first subspace. The computer is also configured to determine based on the second subset, haptic forces in a second subspace different from the first subspace.

One embodiment of the present invention sets forth a technique for redistributing geometric primitives generated by tessellation and geometry shaders for per-vertex by multiple graphics pipelines. Geometric primitives that are generated in a first processing stage are collected and redistributed more evenly and in smaller batches to the multiple graphics pipelines for vertex processing in a second processing stage. The smaller batches do not exceed the resource limits of a graphics pipeline and the per-vertex processing workloads of the graphics pipelines in the second stage are balanced. Therefore, the performance of the tessellation and geometry shaders is improved.

One embodiment of the present invention sets forth a technique for improving graphics rendering efficiency by processing pixels in a compressed format whenever possible within a multi-sampling graphics pipeline. Each geometric primitive is rasterized into fragments, corresponding to screen space pixels covered at least partially by the geometric primitive. Fragment coverage represents the pixel area covered by the geometric primitive and determines the weighted contribution of a fragment color to the corresponding screen space pixel. Samples associated with a given fragment are called sibling samples and have the same color value. The property of sibling samples having the same color value is exploited to compress and process multiple samples, thereby reducing the size of the associated logic and the amount of data written to and read from the frame buffer.

The invention relates to a method, a device, a system and a software program product for determining for a pixel a coverage mask reflecting an orientation and possibly a distance from the pixel center of an original edge vector. The pixel is to be employed for displaying at least a part of a geometric primitive on a display, and the original edge vector represents an oriented edge of the geometric primitive. The method comprises as a first step determining one of four quadrants of a Cartesian coordinate system to which the original edge vector belongs due to its orientation. The original edge vector is then transposed into a predetermined one of the four quadrants. Next, a stored coverage mask is fetched, which is associated at least indirectly to the transposed edge vector. Finally, the fetched coverage mask is transformed to the quadrant to which the original edge vector belongs.

A system, apparatus, and method are disclosed for modifying positions of sample positions for selectably oversampling pixels to anti-alias non-geometric portions of computer-generated images, such as texture, at least in part, by translating (e.g., shifting) shading sample positions relative to a frame of reference in which there is no relative motion between the geometries and the coverage sample positions. In one embodiment, an exemplary method determines whether a coverage sample position is covered by a geometric primitive. The method includes translating a shading sample position from an original shading sample position to the coverage sample position. This generally occurs if the geometry covers the coverage sample position to form a covered coverage sample position. Further, the method samples a shading value at the covered coverage sample positions for the pixel portion to anti-alias, for example, texture to reduce level of detail (“LOD”) artifacts.

A circuit arrangement, program product and method utilize the known view orientation for an image frame to be rendered to optimize the generation and/or use of an Accelerated Data Structure (ADS) used in physical rendering-based image processing. In particular, it has been found that while geometry primitives that are not within a view orientation generally cannot be culled from a scene when a physical rendering technique such as ray tracing is performed, those primitives nonetheless have a smaller impact on the resulting image frame, and as a result, less processing resources can be applied to such primitives, leaving greater processing resources available for processing those primitives that are located within the view orientation, and thereby improving overall rendering performance.

A graphics system and method for reducing redundant transformation calculations and lighting calculations performed on vertices that are shared by more than one geometric primitive is disclosed. The reduction in redundant calculations is accomplished by delaying the formation of geometric primitives until after transformation and lighting has been performed on the vertices. Transformation and or lighting are performed independently on a vertex-by-vertex basis without reference to which geometric primitives the vertices belong to. After transformation and or lighting, geometric primitives may be formed utilizing previously generated connectivity information. The connectivity information may include mesh buffer references, vertex tags, or other types of information.

A graphics system and method for processing geometry compressed, three-dimensional graphics data are disclosed. After transforming and lighting each vertex, a vertex data stream is decompressed using connectivity information, and vertexes are reassembled into geometric primitives. The connectivity information may include mesh buffer references, vertex tags, or other types of information. Independent buffers, queues, and/or caches are used to simultaneously store: (a) vertex data for the next several primitives, (b) vertex data that will be reused, (c) vertex tags, (d) control tags, (e) vertex data being assembled into a primitive, and (f) an assembled primitive ready to be launched. The assembled primitive may be clip tested for visibility in a defined viewport, before investing time to have the primitive processed into pixel data for display. The independent buffers, queues, and/or caches may also enable the vertex processing steps to be performed in parallel and at different rates.

A method of obtaining a three-dimensional digital model of an artificial object, made up of a plurality of geometric primitives, the artificial object being in a single two-dimensional photograph, the method comprising: using edge detection to define a two-dimensional outline of the artificial object within the photograph; interactively allowing a user to define two-dimensional profiles of successive ones of the geometric primitives; interactively allowing a user to sweep respective profiles over an extent of a corresponding one of the geometric primitives within the image; generating successive three-dimensional model parts from existing detected edges of the corresponding geometric primitives and the sweeping of the respective profile; and aligning the plurality of three-dimensional model parts to form the three-dimensional model.

One embodiment of the present invention sets forth a technique for improving graphics rendering efficiency by processing pixels in a compressed format whenever possible within a multi-sampling graphics pipeline. Each geometric primitive is rasterized into fragments, corresponding to screen space pixels covered at least partially by the geometric primitive. Fragment coverage represents the pixel area covered by the geometric primitive and determines the weighted contribution of a fragment color to the corresponding screen space pixel. Samples associated with a given fragment are called sibling samples and have the same color value. The property of sibling samples having the same color value is exploited to compress and process multiple samples, thereby reducing the size of the associated logic and the amount of data written to and read from the frame buffer.

A method for measuring geometric quantities intrinsic to an anatomical system of a patient, based on two stereoscopic images. Registration data are received on each of the two stereoscopic images. By using geometric calibration information, a three-dimensional geometric primitive is determined defined by at least a portion of the received registration data. Based on the three-dimensional geometric primitive, a value of geometric quantity intrinsic to the anatomical system is computed.