Publications related to Visual effects

Model uncertainties in action effects and load bearing capacity calculation in statically indeterminate reinforced concrete structures

Aurelio Muttoni, Alain Nussbaumer, Xhemsi Malja

For the dimensioning and assessment of structures, it is common practice to compare action effects with sectional resistances. Extensive studies have been performed to quantify the model uncertainty on the resistance side. However, for statically indetermi ...

Ernst & Sohn2024

Imagine the Unseen World: A Benchmark for Systematic Generalization in Visual World Models

Caglar Gulcehre

Systematic compositionality, or the ability to adapt to novel situations by creating a mental model of the world using reusable pieces of knowledge, remains a significant challenge in machine learning. While there has been considerable progress in the lang ...

2023

From finger animation to full-body embodiment of avatars with different morphologies and proportions

Mathias Guy Delahaye

VR (Virtual Reality) is a real-time simulation that creates the subjective illusion of being in a virtual world. This thesis explores how integrating the user's body and fingers can be achieved and beneficial for the user to experience VR. At the advent of ...

EPFL2023

Inter-Task Transfer of Prism Adaptation through Motor Imagery

Lisa Aïcha Mireille Julie Fleury

Prism adaptation (PA) is a useful method to investigate short-term sensorimotor plasticity. Following active exposure to prisms, individuals show consistent after-effects, probing that they have adapted to the perturbation. Whether after-effects are transf ...

MDPI2023

Out-of-body illusion induced by visual-vestibular stimulation

Olaf Blanke, Bruno Herbelin, Hsin-Ping Wu, Sophie Jacqueline Andrée Betka, Florian Lance, Estelle Nakul

Out-of-body experiences (OBEs) are characterized by the subjective feeling of being located outside one's physical body and perceiving one's own body from an elevated perspective looking downwards. OBEs have been correlated with abnormal integration of bod ...

Cell Press2023

Efficient and Accurate Physically-Based Differentiable Rendering

Delio Aleardo Vicini

Physically-based rendering algorithms generate photorealistic images of virtual scenes. By simulating light paths in a scene, complex physical effects such as shadows, reflections and volumetric scattering can be reproduced. Over the last decade, physicall ...

EPFL2022

Integrating non-visual effects of light in the automated daylight-responsive control of blinds and electric lighting

Marta Benedetti

The use of daylight in buildings is important because it contributes to energy savings by reducing the use of electric lighting and space heating. It also impacts on biological functions and on well-being. Indeed, light not only allows vision, but has non- ...

EPFL2021

Human-Centered Scene Understanding via Crowd Counting

Weizhe Liu

Human-centered scene understanding is the process of perceiving and analysing a dynamic scene observed through a network of sensors with emphasis on human-related activities. It includes the visual perception of human-related activities from either single ...

EPFL2021

Practical Product Path Guiding Using Linearly Transformed Cosines

Wenzel Alban Jakob

Path tracing is now the standard method used to generate realistic imagery in many domains, e.g., film, special effects, architecture etc. Path guiding has recently emerged as a powerful strategy to counter the notoriously long computation times required t ...

WILEY2020

Advancing ecohydrology in the 21st century: A convergence of opportunities

Andrea Rinaldo, Gabriel George Katul, Nicolaas Cornelis van de Giesen

Nature-based solutions for water-resource challenges require advances in the science of ecohydrology. Current understanding is limited by a shortage of observations and theories that can further our capability to synthesize complex processes across scales ...

2020

Specular Manifold Sampling for Rendering High-Frequency Caustics and Glints

Wenzel Alban Jakob, Tizian Lucien Zeltner

Scattering from specular surfaces produces complex optical effects that are frequently encountered in realistic scenes: intricate caustics due to focused reflection, multiple refraction, and high-frequency glints from specular microstructure. Yet, despite ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2020

Multi-scale modelling of concrete structures affected by alkali-silica reaction: Coupling the mesoscopic damage evolution and the macroscopic concrete deterioration

Jean-François Molinari, Emil Gallyamov, Mauro Corrado, Roozbeh Rezakhani, Aurelia Isabel Cuba Ramos

A finite-element approach based on the first-order FE2 homogenisation technique is formulated to analyse the alkali-silica reaction-induced damage in concrete structures, by linking the concrete degradation at the macro-scale to the reaction extent at the ...

PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD2020

Local structural investigation of hafnia-zirconia polymorphs in powders and thin films by X-ray absorption spectroscopy

Reinis Ignatans

Despite increasing attention for the recently found ferro- and antiferroelectric properties, the polymorphism in hafnia- and zirconia-based thin films is still not sufficiently understood. In the present work, we show that it is important to have a good qu ...

PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD2019

The role of optic flow pooling in insect flight control in cluttered environments

Dario Floreano, Julien Jean Denis Nicolas Lecoeur, Emily Baird

Flight through cluttered environments, such as forests, poses great challenges for animals and machines alike because even small changes in flight path may lead to collisions with nearby obstacles. When flying along narrow corridors, insects use the magnit ...

Nature Research2019

Geometric and Physical Constraints for Drone-Based Head Plane Crowd Density Estimation

Pascal Fua, Mathieu Salzmann, Weizhe Liu, Krzysztof Maciej Lis

State-of-the-art methods for counting people in crowded scenes rely on deep networks to estimate crowd density in the image plane. While useful for this purpose, this image- plane density has no immediate physical meaning because it is subject to perspecti ...

IEEE2019

Perceived and yet not seen: non-visual effects in daylit spaces

Marilyne Andersen, Forrest Simon Webler, Victoria Eugenia Soto Magán

Findings from neuroscience are increasingly interwoven with architectural research (1,2). Understanding physiological responses to environmental stimuli in the built environment is critical when evaluating occupant health and wellbeing. Research in the fie ...

2018

Towards Human-Centric Lighting for Office Buildings: Pilot Study on the Interactions of Visual, Perceptual and Non-Visual Effects of Workplace (Day) Lighting

Marilyne Andersen, Victoria Eugenia Soto Magán

Although knowledge about the impact of light on individuals beyond vision is becoming substantial and less and less controversial, there is still a gap on how to properly address what type of lighting quality one should seek in an indoor space. What consti ...

KARGER2017

Quasi-Newton Methods for Real-Time Simulation of Hyperelastic Materials

Ladislav Kavan, Sofien Bouaziz

We present a new method for real-time physics-based simulation supporting many different types of hyperelastic materials. Previous methods such as Position-Based or Projective Dynamics are fast but support only a limited selection of materials; even classi ...

2017

On the integration of Non-Image-Forming effects of light on venetian blinds and electric lighting control

Jean-Louis Scartezzini, Laurent Deschamps, Ali Motamed, Marta Benedetti

Light induces important “Non-Image-Forming” (NIF) effects on human physiology and behavior, such as improvement of alertness, cognitive performance and mood. Considering these effects in office lighting can improve well-being and productivity of the occupa ...

Elsevier2017

Subsurface ablation of tissue by ultrafast laser

Thomas Jean Victor Marie Lanvin

Laser-induced optical breakdown (LIOB) is a multiphoton process which can be used for selective removal of material. It revolves around the creation of a plasma in the focal volume of a beam, and requires very high peak intensities in the order of the GW.c ...

EPFL2017