Reinhard Klein

The european union funded project 3D-COFORM (3D-COllection-FORMation) deals with the development of novel techniques for digitising objects from the cultural heritage area. The goal is to digitise such objects more efficiently and with better quality compared to the current state-of-the-art. This way 3D-documentation will become an everyday practical choice for digital documentation campaigns in the cultural heritage sector.

The image-based acquisition of complex optical material properties is one of the major research topics in our group. The goal of this project is the development of novel techniques for the efficient and high-fidelity capture of high-dimensional material representations like, e.g. the bidirectional texture function (BTF). Example data is publicy available at the BTF database Bonn.

Car paint and especially metallic or pearlescent paints pose serious challenges to computer graphics. This is due to their high dynamic range, their high frequent changes of reflectance both in angular and in spatial domain as well as the angular dependent color shift behaviour of pearlescent paints which is not covered by commonplace reflectance models. In the Car Paint Project we develop new compression, rendering and editing techniques for all kinds of car paints.

In this project we strive to derive a statistical model of the space spanned by a database of measured BTFs. This way, we intend to develop a dramatically more general representation of materials than is currently available. The goal is to reparameterize the high-dimensional material space to allow perceptually meaningful interpolations between the acquired samples, i.e., to generate new materials that blend qualities of samples from the dataset.

This project aims at methods for view-dependent realtime visualisation of city models with details up to single cm close to the viewer. Apart from supporting the realtime visualisation the employed LoD hierarchies should also support accentuation and abstraction of semantic information.

In the scope of the Last-Mile Project we are carrying out research on interactive visualisation of potential tsunami hazards via networks.

The goal of this project is markerless and real-time tracking a human hand (position, orientation and joint angles) based on computer vision in order to enable natural and efficient human computer interaction.

The MERCW project focuses on the study of the dumpsites of chemical weapons from the Second World War located in the Baltic Sea and the assessment of the resulting potential threat to the marine environment and the population. Within the scope of this project, we are doing research on visualization techniques for suitable interactive exploration of the heterogeneous project relevant data.

3D acquisition devices usually produce unstructured point-clouds as primary output. A challenge in this context is the decomposition of the point-cloud data into known parts in order to introduce abstractions of the originally unorganized data. This information can be used for compression, recognition and reconstruction.

The goal of the PROBADO project is to develop tools and systems that allow academic libraries to treat different common documents in the same way as textual documents. Amongst other document types, the project's focus is on 3D-models stemming from the architectural domain. Thereby, the major task is to develop appropriate searching and classification methods for such 3D objects.

This project aims to advance modelling methods applied in procedural modeling by analyzing how existing approaches to model specific types of models or generic procedural modeling approaches can be improved.

Within the Research Training Group 437 "Landform - a structured and variable boundary layer" Ph.D. students of various scientific branches work together to help understand the role of the landform in geo-systems.

In this project an interactive visual approach to shape analysis of 3D structures is taken. As concrete application serves here the analysis of the skull morphology of European mice and rats based on high-resolution 3D scans.

To correctly simulate materials under arbitrary illumination, the light simulation in a virtual scene must be calculated on a pure spectral basis. This is already done in modern rendering systems. For a few classes of materials spectral reflectance data is already acquired for a few light and view directions using spectrometers and gonioreflectometer setups. This is sometimes enough to fit analytical models to the measured data. But for anisotropic materials or for materials with strong variations in angular or spatial domain there are currently no measurement setups at hand. Similar setups like the ones based on RGB CCD cameras are impractical for spectral measurements because of the high costs of cameras and light sources needed for spectral measurements. In this project we plan to combine RGB and spectral measurement methods to come up with an efficient and pratical measurement setup for spectral BTFs. Furthermore, algorithm for analysis, compression and efficient rendering for such RGB-spectral-combined data will be investigated.

In the COHERENT project, six leading European organisations provide complementary competencies to create a new networked holographic audio-visual platform to support real-time collaborative 3D interaction between geographically distributed teams.

EPOCH is a network of about a hundred European cultural institutions joining their efforts to improve the quality and effectiveness of the use of Information and Communication Technology for Cultural Heritage. Participants include university departments, research centres, heritage institutions, such as museums or national heritage agencies, and commercial enterprises, together endeavouring to overcome the fragmentation of current research in this field.

In the context of OpenSG Plus the most important german research institutions in the field of 3D computer graphics want to bundle their capabilities to support OpenSG and improve it by forward-looking functionality.

The RealReflect project’s goal is to increase the realism of Virtual Reality (VR) technology by developing physically correct visualization technology capable of accounting for phenomena like metamerism, fluorescence and light polarization and integrating it into an existing VR system. This will enable users from many different areas like automotive industry or architecture to create VR simulations for the interior design, thereby avoiding the necessity to build expensive real prototypes which reduces costs as well as time to market of the overall end products.

The goal of this project is to elaborate a set of algorithms and methods that will allow our system to intelligently compare 3D objects in a way that is close to the human notion of resemblance. As a further step, these results will be used to automatically search in 3D Digital Libraries.

The tremendous amount of data acquired via remote sensing or airborne sensors provide the basis for a photorealistic rendering of ample landscapes, even from close-by viewpoints. This projects aims at a realtime exploration of such arbitrary-sized datasets without sacrificing visible detail.

The goal of the project is the creation of the technological bases for a synergetic connection of the innovative service of clothing for the individual customer (tailor-made suit) with the potential of the E-Commerce business using Virtual-Reality (VR) methods.