Mathematics

Feature detection and tracking with an affine consistency check

The equations for detecting features, tracking them between consecutive frames, and checking for consistency using an affine transformation will be derived below using the inverse compositional approach. We will begin by deriving the equations for tracking, because this will yield some insight into which features would be good to track. The source code for this …

kd tree construction using the surface area heuristic, stack-based traversal, and the hyperplane separation theorem

Test render of a stripped down version of the Sponza model (approximately 150,000 triangles). 4,258 samples.

In this post we will employ the hyperplane separation theorem and the surface area heuristic for kd tree construction to improve the performance of our path tracer. Previous posts have relied simply on detecting intersections between an axis aligned bounding box and the minimum bounding box of a triangle primitive. By utilizing the hyperplane separation …

Path tracer: thin lens, texture mapping, Fresnel equations, and smooth shading

1800 samples. A render illustrating Fresnel reflection and texture mapping.

A few new features have been added to our path tracer. The depth of field extension has been reworked slightly using the thin lens equation allowing us to specify a focal length and aperture. Fresnel equations have been added to more accurately model the behavior of light at the interface between media of different refractive …

Path tracer with triangle primitives and binary space partitioning

Subdivided Blender monkey. 5,808 triangles. 390 samples.

UPDATE: The post below was a purely naive attempt at implementing a rudimentary bounding volume hierarchy. A much more efficient implementation using a kd tree is available in this post. We will continue with the project we left off with in this post. We will attempt to add triangles to our list of primitives. Once …

Bidiagonalization using Householder transformations

Diagram representing the Householder transformation.

The previous post was a discussion on employing Householder transformations to perform a QR decomposition. This post will be short. I've had this code lying around for a while now and thought I would make it available. The process of bidiagonalization using Householder transformations amounts to nothing more than alternating by left and right transformations. …

Ocean simulation part two: using the fast Fourier transform

A screen capture of the surface with lighting and fog.

In this post we will analyze the equations for the statistical wave model presented in Tessendorf's paper[1] on simulating ocean water. In the previous post we used the discrete Fourier transform to generate our wave height field. We will proceed with the analysis in order to implement our own fast Fourier transform. With this implementation …

A calibration method based on barycentric coordinates for multi-touch systems

In this post we will touch upon the calibration component for multi-touch systems. By the end of this post we will implement a calibration widget that is integrated with our tracker modules, but before we do that we'll discuss the mathematics behind one method for mapping camera space to screen space. Below is a screen …