Significant facet retrieval for real-time 3D sound rendering in complex virtual environments

ABSTRACT

Sound rendering requires that many different aspects are considered simultaneously, especially when rendering a real-time virtual environment. In 3D sound rendering, much the same as for graphics, one of the major influencing factors is the number of reflective polygons in a scene and due to the increase in the ability of most common graphics cards this number can now be very high, especially when scene designers produce an optimum scene using other optimizing tools such as Polygon Cruncher or Rational Reducer. In addition, the use of programs such as Lightscape™ [20], which is used to produce realistic lighting, by using per vertex shading, increases the number of polygons in a scene by several factors. Therefore a strong, pre-processing method is proposed that dramatically reduces the number of polygons in the scene to a suitable level for real-time sound rendering. The method can also be combined with other methods (e.g. scene partitioning) for even lower CPU usage.

REFERENCES

• 1: Alias|Wavefront: http://www.aliaswavefront.com
• 2: Allen, J., Berkley, D. Image Method for Efficiently simulating small room acoustics, Journal Acoustical Society of America, Vol. 65, No. 4, 1979, pp. 943--951.
• 3: Barequet, G., Chazelle, Guibas L., Mitchell J., Tal A., BOXTREE: Hierarchical Representation for Surfaces in 3D, Computer Graphics Forum, 1996.
• 4: Gill Barequet , Sariel Har-Peled, Efficiently approximating the minimum-volume bounding box of a point set in three dimensions, Proceedings of the tenth annual ACM-SIAM symposium on Discrete algorithms, p.82-91, January 17-19, 1999, Baltimore, Maryland, United States
• 5: Borish J., Extension of the Image Model to arbitrary polyhedra, Journal Acoustical Society of America, Vol. 75, No. 6, 1984, pp. 1827--1836.
• 6: Jonathan D. Cohen , Ming C. Lin , Dinesh Manocha , Madhav Ponamgi, I-COLLIDE: an interactive and exact collision detection system for large-scale environments, Proceedings of the 1995 symposium on Interactive 3D graphics, p.189-ff., April 09-12, 1995, Monterey, California, United States [doi>10.1145/199404.199437]
• 7: Norm Dadoun , David G. Kirkpatrick , John P. Walsh, The geometry of beam tracing, Proceedings of the first annual symposium on Computational geometry, p.55-61, June 05-07, 1985, Baltimore, Maryland, United States [doi>10.1145/323233.323241]
• 8: Discreet (Autodesk): http://www.discreet.com
• 9: Eckstein J., Schomer E., Dynamic Collision Detection in Virtual Reality Applications, International Conference on Computer Graphics and Visualisation, EUROGRAPHICS and IFIP WG 5.10, 1999.
• 10: Ehmann S. and Lin M., Accurate and Fast Proximity Queries Between Polyhedra Using Surface Decomposition, Computer Graphics Forum (Proc. of EUROGRAPHICS), 2001.
• 11: Foster S., Wenzel E., Taylor R., Real-Time Synthesis of Complex Acoustic Environments, Proceedings of the IEEE workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics, New Platz, NY, 1991, pp. 365--374.
• 12: Henry Fuchs , Zvi M. Kedem , Bruce F. Naylor, On visible surface generation by a priori tree structures, Proceedings of the 7th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.124-133, July 14-18, 1980, Seattle, Washington, United States
• 13: Thomas Funkhouser , Ingrid Carlbom , Gary Elko , Gopal Pingali , Mohan Sondhi , Jim West, A beam tracing approach to acoustic modeling for interactive virtual environments, Proceedings of the 25th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.21-32, July 1998 [doi>10.1145/280814.280818]
• 14: Thomas Funkhouser , Patrick Min , Ingrid Carlbom, Real-time acoustic modeling for distributed virtual environments, Proceedings of the 26th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.365-374, July 1999 [doi>10.1145/311535.311590]
• 15: Paul S. Heckbert , Pat Hanrahan, Beam tracing polygonal objects, ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics, v.18 n.3, p.119-127, July 1984
• 16: Hein R., Binaural Room Simulation Based on an Image Source Model with Addition of Statistical Methods to Include the Diffuse Sound Scattering of Walls and to Predict the Reverberant Tail, Journal of Applied Acoustics, Vol. 38, No. 2--4, 1993, pp. 145--160.
• 17: Herder J., "Optimization of Sound Spatialization Resource Management through Clustering", IEEE Signal Processing, Jan 2000, pp. 564--571.
• 18: James T. Klosowski , Martin Held , Joseph S. B. Mitchell , Henry Sowizral , Karel Zikan, Efficient Collision Detection Using Bounding Volume Hierarchies of k-DOPs, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, v.4 n.1, p.21-36, January 1998 [doi>10.1109/2945.675649 ]
• 19: Krokstad A., Strom S., Sorsdal S., Calculating the Acoustical Room Response by Use of a Ray Tracing Technique, Journal of Sound and Vibration, Vol. 8, No. 1, 1968, pp. 118--125.
• 20: Lightscape (Autodesk): http://www.lightscape.com
• 21: Min P., Funkhouser T., Priority-Driven Acoustic Modeling for Virtual Environments, EUROGRAPHICS, Vol. 19, No. 3, 2000, pp. 179--188.
• 22: Naylor G., "ODEON - Another Hybrid Room Acoustical Model", Journal of Applied Acoustics, Vol. 38, No. 2--4, 1993, pp. 131--144.
• 23: Polygon Cruncher: http://www.mootools.com
• 24: Franco P. Preparata , Michael I. Shamos, Computational geometry: an introduction, Springer-Verlag New York, Inc., New York, NY, 1985
• 25: Rational Reducer: http://www.rational-reducer.com
• 26: Savioja L., Huopaniemi J., Huotilainen T., Takala T., Real-Time Virtual Audio Reality, Proceedings of the ICMC, Hong Kong, 1996, pp. 107--110.
• 27: Nicolas Tsingos , Thomas Funkhouser , Addy Ngan , Ingrid Carlbom, Modeling acoustics in virtual environments using the uniform theory of diffraction, Proceedings of the 28th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.545-552, August 2001 [doi>10.1145/383259.383323]
• 28: Nicolas Tsingos , Jean-Dominique Gascuel, A general model for the simulation of room acoustics based on hierachical radiosity, ACM SIGGRAPH 97 Visual Proceedings: The art and interdisciplinary programs of SIGGRAPH '97, p.149, August 03-08, 1997, Los Angeles, California, United States [doi>10.1145/259081.259236]
• 29: Vian J., Van Maercke D., Calculation of Room Response Using a Ray Tracing Method, Proceedings of the ICA Symposium on Acoustics and Theatre Planning for Performing Arts, Vancouver, CA, 1986, pp. 74--78.
• 30: Turner Whitted, An improved illumination model for shaded display, Communications of the ACM, v.23 n.6, p.343-349, June 1980 [doi>10.1145/358876.358882]
• 31: Wilson A., Larson E., Manocha D., Lin M., Partitioning And Handling Massive Models for Interactive Collision Detection, EUROGRAPHICS, Vol. 18, No. 3, 1999
• 32: Ponder M., Papagiannakis G., Molet T., Magnenat-Thalmann N., Thalmann D., "VHD++ Development Framework: Towards Extendible, Component Based VR/AR Simulation Engine Featuring Advanced Virtual Character Technologies", Computer Graphics International, 2003

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.3 COMPUTER GRAPHICS
      I.3.6 Methodology and Techniques

General Terms:
Algorithms

Keywords:
bounding-box, scene segmentation, sound rendering, virtual environments