Byounghyun Yoo, Soonhung Han, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, in review.

Abstract:

This paper introduces a displacement mapping technique which represents protruded shapes on the
surface of an object. Previous approaches for the image-based displacement mapping can represent
only shapes depressed from a polygon surface. The proposed technique can represent shapes such as
tall buildings protruding from the underlying surface. Two auxiliary surfaces that are perpendicular
to the underlying surface are added along the boundary of the polygon surface in order to represent
pixels overflowing the boundary of the polygon surface. The proposed approach can accurately represent
the silhouettes of protruded shapes. Furthermore, both smooth displacement of protruded shapes and
abrupt displacement such as perpendicular protrusion by means of adding the supplementary texture
information to the steep surface of the protruded shape can be represented. Using per-pixel instructions
on a programmable GPU, this approach can be executed in real-time. Overall, the proposed method
provides an effective solution for the representation of protruding shapes such as high-rise buildings in
an urban environment which can be used in GIS and VR applications.

Keywords: building representation, image-based rendering, motion parallax, protruded shape representation,
silhouette management, displacement mapping