Activision Blizzard

Abstract: In this paper, we propose two real-time models for simulating subsurface scattering for a large variety of translucent materials, which need under 0.5 ms per frame to execute. This makes them a practical option for real-time production scenarios. Current state-of-the-art, real-time approaches simulate subsurface light transport by approximating the radially symmetric non-separable diffusion kernel with a sum of separable Gaussians, which requires multiple up to 12 1D convolutions. In this work we relax the requirement of radial symmetry to approximate a 2D diffuse reflectance profile by a single separable kernel. We first show that low-rank approximations based on matrix factorization outperform previous approaches, but they still need several passes to get good results. To solve this, we present two different separable models: the first one yields a high-quality diffusion simulation, while the second one offers an attractive trade-off between physical accuracy and artistic control. Both allow rendering of subsurface scattering using only two 1D convolutions, reducing both execution time and memory consumption, while delivering results comparable to techniques with higher cost. Using our importance-sampling and jittering strategies, only seven samples per pixel are required. Our methods can be implemented as simple post-processing steps without intrusive changes to existing rendering pipelines.

Abstract: Tactile recognition enables robots identify target objects or environments from tactile sensory readings. The recent advancement of deep learning and biological tactile sensing inspire us proposing an end-to-end architecture ROTConvPCE-mv that performs tactile recognition using residual orthogonal tiling and pyramid convolution ensemble. Our approach uses stacks of raw frames and tactile flow as dual input, and incorporates the strength of multi-layer OTConvs (orthogonal tiling convolutions) organized in a residual learning paradigm. We empirically demonstrate that OTConvs have adjustable invariance capability to different input transformations such as translation, rotation, and scaling. To effectively capture multi-scale global context, a pyramid convolution structure is attached to the concatenated output of two residual OTConv pathways. The extensive experimental evaluations show that ROTConvPCE-mv outperforms several state-of-the-art methods with a large margin regarding recognition accuracy, robustness, and fault-tolerance. Practical suggestions and hints are summarized throughout this paper to facilitate the effective recognition using tactile sensory data.