Realistic (ideally photorealistic) real-time rendering has remained an elusive goal in computer graphics. While photorealistic rendering has certainly been achieved at the expense of tremendous computational resources and corresponding rendering times; real-time rendering typically must accept a great number of compromises to achieve adequate performance, such as aliasing artifacts, the...
Graphics hardware in mobile devices has become more powerful, allowing rendering techniques such as ray-cast volume rendering to be done at interactive rates. This increase of performance provides desktop capabilities combined with the portability of a tablet. Volumes can demand a high amount of memory in order to be loaded...
This dissertation provides a comparison of statistical and econometric frameworks, using a previously unused freight data source, to study crash frequency by crash type and heavy-vehicle hard braking in Oregon. Hard braking can serve as a proxy for several factors, one of which is safety. Therefore, with the hard braking...
Heterogeneous catalytic reactions in solvents are important for chemical processes like direct methanol fuels, biomass conversion to biofuels and electrochemical reduction of CO2 to fuels. Numerous experimental studies have shown that co-adsorbates and solvents affect the rate and selectivity of heterogeneous catalytic reaction, therefore fundamental understanding of how co-adsorbates and...
An important problem in computer graphics is to determine where contour lines and ridges appear in a surface constructed from a triangle mesh. In this presentation we will investigate a new answer to this problem – the horizon measure. The horizon measure determines the likelihood of contour lines to appear...
This dissertation addresses the problem of semantic labeling of image pixels. In the course of our work, we considered different types of semantic labels, including object classes (e.g., car, person), 3D depth values (in the range 0 to 80 meters), and affordance classes (e.g., walkable, sittable). Semantic pixel labeling is...
Recognizing human actions in videos is a long-standing problem in computer vision with a wide range of applications including video surveillance, content retrieval, and sports analysis. This thesis focuses on addressing efficiency and robustness of video classification in unconstrained real-world settings. The thesis work can be broadly divided into four...
Modeling tire-snow interaction is important in designing effective snow tires, which directly affects road safety during wintry weather. Unfortunately, tires have complex tread designs and the physical properties of snow have not been characterized. We employ the Material Point Method (MPM) for simulating a material that mimics the fracturing and...
3D object recognition is a very difficult and important problem in computer vision, arising in a wide range of applications. Typically in 3D object recognition, interest points are extracted from images and then matched. A shortcoming of this approach is that points only carry local visual information. Therefore, there
could...
Numerical results are presented using a higher-order pseudo-spectral method in order to solve the Zakharov-Craig-Sulem formulation of the Euler model. We study the effects of variable bathymetry on weakly-dispersive, weakly-nonlinear, shallow water waves. Improved predictions on wave amplitude and shoaling behavior are developed by analytical means in the context of...