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Computer Science, Graphics, cs.GR
Abstract:
Sample patterns have many uses in Computer Graphics, ranging from procedural
object placement over Monte Carlo image synthesis to non-photorealistic
depiction. Their properties such as discrepancy, spectra, anisotropy, or
progressiveness have been analyzed extensively. However, designing methods to
produce sampling patterns with certain properties can require substantial
hand-crafting effort, both in coding, mathematical derivation and compute time.
In particular, there is no systematic way to derive the best sampling algorithm
for a specific end-task.
Tackling this issue, we suggest another level of abstraction: a toolkit to
end-to-end optimize over all sampling methods to find the one producing
user-prescribed properties such as discrepancy or a spectrum that best fit the
end-task. A user simply implements the forward losses and the sampling method
is found automatically -- without coding or mathematical derivation -- by
making use of back-propagation abilities of modern deep learning frameworks.
While this optimization takes long, at deployment time the sampling method is
quick to execute as iterated unstructured non-linear filtering using radial
basis functions (RBFs) to represent high-dimensional kernels. Several important
previous methods are special cases of this approach, which we compare to
previous work and demonstrate its usefulness in several typical Computer
Graphics applications. Finally, we propose sampling patterns with properties
not shown before, such as high-dimensional blue noise with projective
properties.
