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Sparse zonal harmonic factorization for efficient SH rotation

Published: 05 June 2012 Publication History

Abstract

We present a sparse analytic representation for spherical functions, including those expressed in a Spherical Harmonic (SH) expansion, that is amenable to fast and accurate rotation on the GPU. Exploiting the fact that each band-l SH basis function can be expressed as a weighted sum of 2l + 1 rotated band-l Zonal Harmonic (ZH) lobes, we develop a factorization that significantly reduces this number. We investigate approaches for promoting sparsity in the change-of-basis matrix, and also introduce lobe sharing to reduce the total number of unique lobe directions used for an order-N expansion from N2 to 2N-1. Our representation does not introduce approximation error, is suitable for any type of spherical function (e.g., lighting or transfer), and requires no offline fitting procedure; only a (sparse) matrix multiplication is required to map to/from SH. We provide code for our rotation algorithms, and apply them to several real-time rendering applications.

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    Published In

    cover image ACM Transactions on Graphics
    ACM Transactions on Graphics  Volume 31, Issue 3
    May 2012
    92 pages
    ISSN:0730-0301
    EISSN:1557-7368
    DOI:10.1145/2167076
    Issue’s Table of Contents
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 05 June 2012
    Accepted: 01 December 2011
    Revised: 01 September 2011
    Received: 01 December 2010
    Published in TOG Volume 31, Issue 3

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    Author Tags

    1. Spherical harmonic rotation
    2. rendering

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    • (2022)Gaussian Process for Radiance Functions on the SphereComputer Graphics Forum10.1111/cgf.1450141:6(67-81)Online publication date: 5-Apr-2022
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