Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

International Initiatives

Inria Associate Teams

• EA CRISP http://www-sop.inria.fr/reves/crisp/

  The goal of the CRISP associate team between REVES and University of California (UC) Berkeley is to investigate novel ways to create, render and interact with images based on the study of human perception. This novel and emerging area has been the focus of ongoing collaborations between researchers from the REVES research group at Inria (Adrien Bousseau, George Drettakis) and researchers in Computer Science and Vision Science at UC Berkeley (Maneesh Agrawala, Ravi Ramamoorthi, Martin S. Banks (Human Vision Science)). All of the researchers involved in CRISP share a common interest in creating and manipulating effective synthetic imagery. To achieve this goal we focus on understanding how people perceive complex material, lighting and shape, on developing new rendering algorithms based on this understanding, and on building interactive tools that enable users to efficiently specify the kind of image they wish to create. More specifically, we explore the following research directions :

  Perception: Images are generated from the interaction of lighting, material, and geometry. We evaluate how people perceive material, lighting, and geometry in realistic images such as photographs, and non realistic images such as drawings and paintings. This knowledge of human perception is essential for developing efficient rendering algorithms and interaction tools that focus on the most important perceptual features of an image.

  Rendering: We develop rendering algorithms that generate images that are plausible with respect to the user's intent and allocate resources on the visual effects that best contribute to perception.

  Interaction: We facilitate the creation of material, lighting, and geometric effects in synthetic images by developing novel user interfaces for novice and professional users.

  Our contributions have the potential to benefit different applications of image creation such as illustration (archeology, architecture, education); entertainment (video games, movies) and design (sketching, photograph editing). This research naturally falls in Inria's strategic objective of interacting with real and virtual worlds.

  The CRISP collaboration has resulted in three publications this year in ACM Transactions on Graphics, two being in the SIGGRAPH proceeding. These publications explore the perception of materials in stylized images [11] , the perception of distortions in image-based rendering [18] and vector drawing tools for depicting stylized materials [14] . Ongoing projects include those described in Sec. 6.3.9 and Sec.   6.1.3 .

Informal International Partners

France-USA

Participants : Gaurav Chaurasia, Adrien Bousseau, George Drettakis.

Beyond CRISP, we have an ongoing collaboration with Yale University (Holly Rushmeier and Julie Dorsey), on weathering, and we are continuing this collaboration on stone aging.

We also have an ongoing collaboration with Adobe Research (Sylvain Paris) and MIT (Fredo Durand) on parallel image-proccessing languages and global illumination (Fredo Durand).

France-Germany

Participant : George Drettakis.

We collaborate with the Max-Planck-Institut, Germany, where P. Vangorp (previously at REVES) is now a PostDoc. We collaborate on perception techniques for rendering see publication [18] .

France-Canada

Participant : Adrien Bousseau.

We collaborate with K. Singh (University of Toronto) and Alla Scheffer (U. British Columbia, Vancouver), on sketching techniques for designers (see Sec.  6.3.10 ).

France-Greece

Participant : George Drettakis.

As mentioned in Sec.  6.2.3 we are collaborating with the Technical University of Crete on visual attention, in the context. of the Ph.D. of George Koulieris, supervised by Prof. Katerina Mania and the Un. of Cottburg (D. Cunningham).