Collaborations

Since years, our team is in tight contact with collaborators all around the world, both academical and industrial.

ARTIS is a member of Eurographics (a "leading international organization purely devoted to the needs of professionals in computer graphics and all related visual disciplines").

ARTIS is also a member of the Association Française d'Informatique Graphique (AFIG)

Collaborations
» International academic
» National academic
» Industrial
» Student exchange

International academical collaborations

Association with MIT CSAIL graphics group

INRIA's office of international relations has set up in 2001 a program for "associate teams" that bring together an INRIA project-team and a foreign research team, providing a form of institutional recognition to stable scientific collaborations involving several researchers on each side.

An "associate team" was created for the 2003-2005 period between ARTIS and the Computer Graphics Group at MIT (CSAIL Lab) on the subject of "Flexible Rendering". This association has proven to be extremely positive: several research actions have been performed jointly with MIT researchers, notably the work on simplified representation based on billboard clouds, and the development of a programmable system for stylized rendering.

The associate team has helped this collaboration on a practical level by providing funding for researcher exchanges. The two teams know each other very well and frequent visits and conference calls make actual cooperation a reality.

» The MIT associate team page

RealReflect

The european RealReflect project is a part of the IST-2001-34744 program. This is a research and developement project planned over three years. The goals of RealReflect are:

On the technical level it combines aspects of data acquisition for materials and ligth sources, light simulation, and realistic and physically correct visualization in VR-displays. Academic partners of the project are : Industrial partners are: The role of the ARTIS team in this project are (1) transferring its scientific knowledge in the domain of simulation of the light equilibrium in complex environments and (2) developing new methods for obtaining a realistic solution in accordance with the physical data. The main result of the first year of work has led us to a first version of the High Quality Renderer (HQR) software (C++), based on the photon mapping method.

» The RealReflect project web site

National academical collaborations

ARCHEOS

ARTIS is participating to the ARC ARCHEOS in collaboration with REVES (INRIA-Sophia), the Foundation of the Hellenic World (Athens), ERGA (Stendhal and Pierre Mendès France Univerisities in Grenoble) and ARIA (Ecole d'architecture de Lyon). The ARCHEOS research initiative set out to meet a number of goals. The first was to establish a working relationship between archeologists, historians and architects on the one side, and computer graphics/VR researchers on the other. The second goal was to investigate issues relating to rendering styles, and notably non-photorealistic rendering, and in particular in relationship with archeological applications. The context of this second goal was concentrated in immersive or semi-immersive virtual reality systems, such as the workbench at INRIA Sophia-Antipolis, or the RealityCenter in Grenoble.

» The ARCHEOS web site

CNRS research action: real-time rendering

Nicolas Holzschuch is co-chair, with Pascal Guitton, of the CNRS Research and Prospective Group on Real-Time Rendering. The Real-Time Rendering Group brings together the GRAVIR research laboratory (CNRS UMR 5527), the LIL research laboratory (CNRS UPRES-JE 2335) in Calais, the IRIT research laboratory (CNRS UMR 5505) in Toulouse), the LABRI research laboratory (CNRS UMR 5800) in Bordeaux, the LIRIS research laboratory (CNRS FRE 2672) in Lyon, the LSIIT research laboratory (CNRS UMR 7005) in Strasbourg and the REVES project-team at INRIA Sophia-Antipolis.

The Real-Time Rendering group was charged by the CNRS to identify ways and means to achieve real-time rendering, promising new directions of research and scientific hard points. We had four regular meetings during the year 2003. Each meeting was focused on a specific way of achieving real-time rendering, such as parallelism, using human perception to guide rendering or using programmable graphics hardware. At each meeting, we invited world renommed experts: Mark Segal (ATI Technologies) and David Kirk (NVIDIA) on programmable graphics hardware, Karol Myzskowski (Max-Planck Insitut fur Informatik) on human perception metrics, Philipp Slusallek (Universitat der Saarlandes) and Bruno Raffin (ID-IMAG) on parallel computations for Real-Time Rendering.

» The resarch action web site

Research Ministry grant: SHOW

At the beginning of 2003, the French Ministry of Research launched a call for proposals for collaborative research actions on "Mass of Data". The call for proposals included processing, management and visualization of very large datasets. ARTIS has a project accepted within this call for proposals, the SHOW research project.

SHOW is a collaborative research action with the INRIA projects: Reves of INRIA Sophia, ISA of LORIA and Iparla of UR-Futurs (in Bordeaux). The goal is to work on a very large dataset that represents an architectural model, including walls, windows, doors, furnitures, and small objects. The model is unstructured, as it often happens in industrial applications, usually as the consequence of applying an automatic translator on the 3D data.

The ARTIS project will be working on the automatic generation of a spatial and semantic structure out of this unstructured dataset, using geometrical tools and techniques from Computer Vision. The goal is to separate and identify in the database the walls, furniture and other objects. The other research projects will be using the generated structure for simulation, parameterization and visualization of the architectural dataset.

Region Rhône-Alpes investigation grant: DEREVE

The Region Rhone-Alpes is funding the Dereve research project. The project has been going on for three years in its first phase (Dereve, 1999-2002) and is now in its second phase (Dereve II, 2003-2006). The Dereve research project is grouping together the ARTIS and EVASION research teams of the GRAVIR research laboratory, the LIRIS research laboratory in Lyon and the ICA research laboratory in Grenoble. The goals of the Dereve project are to render large and animated virtual environments in real time, using either photorealistic rendering or non-photorealistic rendering.

In the Dereve project, we are also working in collaboration with the ARIA research laboratory of the Lyon school of Architecture, who is producing a 3D model of the "Ideal City" by the famous Lyon architect, Tony Garnier. As the city has never been built, the architects are seeing fit to have a non-photorealistic rendering of the city, to underline its virtual status.

Industrial Collaborations

Noveltis

Noveltis is a company established in Toulouse (France) and its main activity is to perform studies of applicability and to provide usable solutions to clients in various scientific application domains such as atmospheric physics and chemistry, oceanography, land surfaces and astrophysics. The technology itself is obtained through consolidation and promotion of scientific work as a tool for analysing and managing environmental problems. Noveltis is developing a partnership with INRIA for using the PlantRad software developed by ARTIS into a framework for simulating embeded sensors on satellites. In this context PlantRad serves for the computation of the reflectance of mixed forest and urban regions of the earth surface.

Student exchanges - Eurodoc grants

 The Region Rhône-Alpes has established a grant program to help PhD students in starting actual international cooperation during their PhD years. The following actions have been supported by the program:

Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Sylvain Paris has visited Long Quan at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) twice in 2003: in February-March and in August-September. This collaboration has been mainly centered on developing a new method for face relighting PSQ03b and on formulating the surface-from-images technique PSQ03, PSQ04. During these visits Sylvain Paris has also participated in Gang Zeng PhD work about volumetric recontruction from images ZPLQ03.

MIT

Stéphane Grabli has been visiting Frédo Durand at MIT for four months in 2003, from May 15 to September 15. During this collaboration, Frédo Durand and Stéphane Grabli have introduced a model for Style modeling in computer generated Line-Drawings and implemented this model within a flexible programmable system.

UIUC

From May to July 2003, Samuel Hornus visited prof. John C. Hart, associate professor at University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, with a grant from a collaboration between CNRS and UIUC. We worked on the "Practical visibility project" (NSF grant CCR-0219594). More precisely, we tried to highlight the usability of the 3D visibility complex in some problems such as the continuous maintenance of the visibility polyhedron of a moving observer, or the description of an efficient data-structure for image-based rendering.

 
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