Lovely digital creatures on display at Research Expo April 16

A relative of this cute digital white rabbit will be part of one of the many posters on display April 16 at Research Expo at the Price Center. The picture is a--very rough--draft for the work of computer science Ph.D. student Chiwei Tseng, who works with Professors Ravi Ramamoorthi and Henrik W. Jensen. The work also is part of the Jacobs School's new Center for Visual Computing.
Here's the abstract for Tseng's poster, which is titled "A generic light scattering model for rendering photorealistic animal fur fibers:"

Rendering photorealistic animal fur is of practical importance in many computer graphics productions. In the past, the visual appearances of specific fiber types have been studied, and various light scattering models derived from cylindrical geometry have been proposed. These models, however, lack either physical accuracy or versatility to produce the wide range of specular and diffusive material properties observed on animal fur fibers in the wild. We propose an anatomically based light scattering model for arbitrary animal fur fibers, represented by two coaxial cylinder volumes. We show that our model preserves high fidelity to actual animal fur and can simulate a large array of visual appearances by qualitatively matching synthetic optical microscopy images and far-field scattering profiles with measured data. Through reconstructing the light paths for formerly unexplainable scattering lobes observed on 10 animal fur fiber types, we reveal how the subsurface structures of a fur fiber can bring about decisive effects to its visual appearance.

More info about Research Expo at: http://www.jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/re/