4 DAILY CVPR Wednesday Award Candidate For several decades, volume rendering techniques have been a popular class of methods for simulating light transport in translucent media such as clouds, smoke, and tissue, with various applications in graphics and physics. In the past five years, there has been a shift towards using these methods to model more familiar, everyday objects such as solid, opaque items. “Our paper is about figuring out why these volume rendering methods, originally developed for clouds, can work on things like a Lego truck,” Bailey begins. “We’ve developed a stochastic geometric theory that explains the connection between these two different models.” The initial challenge Bailey faced was understanding the foundational principles of volume rendering, which have been obscured or had a black box put around them by the numerous successful yet complex methods developed in recent years. “Revisiting its roots, you see that in classic volume rendering, scenes are modeled as a collection of microparticles,” he reveals. “Once we could understand it in this very principled manner, we could start to develop ideas and approaches for considering volume rendering on stochastic opaque solid objects.” Did he solve the problem? “Part of it,” he tells us. “I think we’ve opened some new doors. We show how you can develop these rendering algorithms for a very Bailey Miller is a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon. His novel paper, which breaks new ground in volume rendering, has been selected from thousands of accepted papers as a conference highlight and is in the running for a coveted Best Paper Award. Bailey speaks to us before his oral presentation this morning. Objects as Volumes: A Stochastic Geometry View of Opaque Solids
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