{"id":306506,"date":"2009-08-04T09:00:28","date_gmt":"2009-08-04T16:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/?p=306506"},"modified":"2016-10-17T13:11:56","modified_gmt":"2016-10-17T20:11:56","slug":"siggraph-2009-work-graphic-detail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/blog\/siggraph-2009-work-graphic-detail\/","title":{"rendered":"SIGGRAPH 2009: Work in Graphic Detail"},"content":{"rendered":"
By Janie Chang, Writer, Microsoft Research<\/em><\/p>\n With its New Orleans location and a schedule that includes team competitions, an animation festival, musical performances, and a gallery of interactive art, the 36th annual International Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics and Interactive Technologies (SIGGRAPH 2009 (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>) might look suspiciously like a five-day party to outsiders. For attendees however, this is the premier conference for computer graphics and interactive techniques, and represents a valuable opportunity to listen to industry visionaries, get hands-on with technology, share their knowledge, and connect with other professionals. From Aug. 3-7, as many as 25,000 attendees are expected to flock to events at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans.<\/p>\n The size of the conference is an indication not only of interest in this field, but also of the diversity and depth of topics that fall under the auspices of SIGGRAPH. It is often the details that make the difference when it comes to rendering realistic images, and the technical papers being presented during the conference reflect the various approaches researchers are taking to enable better accuracy and easier image manipulation. With 97 papers in 24 topic categories (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>, it is clear that computer graphics and interactive techniques have found application in many aspects of art, animation, special effects, design, music, user interfaces, and engineering. Microsoft Research has been active in SIGGRAPH for almost 20 years, and this year is no different. SIGGRAPH 2009 has accepted seven technical papers from Microsoft Research for presentation at the conference, papers covering a wide range of technical disciplines and encompassing five of the topic categories: Light and Materials; Shape Editing and Deformation; Creating Natural Variations; Imaging and Rendering Pipeline; and Visual, Cut, Paste and Search.<\/p>\n In film production and image editing, both foreground and background details matter. One common editing task is replacement of a boring, featureless sky with one that is more dramatic or better-suited to the scene. Commercial image-search engines depend on keywords, so a search for \u201csunset\u201d could turn up images of poor quality or images that were inaccurately labeled. If a user browses for images in a large collection page-by-page, it could be a time-consuming hunt through thousands of pages. This problem caught the interest of Jian Sun of Microsoft Research Asia (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>, along with Litian Tao of Beihang University and Lu Yuan of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Their research, described in the paper SkyFinder: Attribute-Based Sky Image Search<\/em> (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> and the associated video, seeks to provide a semantic way to conduct the process of search and replace for sky images.<\/p>\n