Handbook of Digital Image Synthesis

Book Preface

MOTIVATION
While its history only dates back to the second half of the twentieth century, the field of computer graphics has undergone a rapid development, not only by adapting techniques from other well-established scientific disciplines, but also by devising alternative approaches to tackle both interdisciplinary and domain-specific challenges. Nowadays, computer graphics is taught at universities and used in industries across continents, so much so that computergenerated imagery has become ubiquitous in modern society, with notable applications including the movie and gaming industries, digital marketing, computer-aided industrial design, architectural design, virtual-environment simulators, and medical imaging.

The technical contributions made by the graphics community over the last few decades have led to the publication of a vast number of scholarly articles and numerous scientific books. The latter range, on the one hand, from general primers gently introducing elementary notions to advanced monographs highly focused in scope, and, on the other hand, from theory-driven treatises to practice-oriented guides putting a greater emphasis on platformspecific implementations. Nevertheless, looking up relevant formulas can still be a rather tedious process, with the derivation of various reported research results remaining hard to find, which may make it daunting for field practitioners to distill and leverage the material disseminated across the substantial amount of published work.

OBJECTIVES
Motivated by the incentive to create a consolidated reference guide, this handbook provides an extensive, yet concise, treatment of the basic principles and advanced concepts underpinning digital image synthesis, while covering a broad range of scientific topics as diverse as pure and applied mathematics, geometric surfaces and data structures, the physics of light interaction and propagation, analytical and numerical simulation schemes, and optical perception and imaging. The presentation of the material is substantiated by numerous figures and computer-generated images illustrating the core ideas, several tables synthesizing results and industry standards, and platform-independent pseudocode highlighting the core algorithms, in addition to a large (though non-exhaustive) collection of bibliographic references to the literature and an index of the standard scientific terms defined therein. Moreover, the foundations that this book rests upon are laid from the ground up, including a compilation of the theoretical formulas relevant for practical implementation in an actual rendering system, along with their step-by-step derivation following a deductive (rather than inductive) reasoning approach.

Besides allowing the reader to fully grasp their underlying assumptions and limitations, the derivations additionally illustrate the methodologies necessary to adapt the results to new problems. To this end, this book explicitly discusses how the latter apply to various instances of algebraic transformations, variance-reduction techniques, low-pass filters, geo- 102 metric surfaces, indexing structures, phase functions, surface re ectance models, light trans- 201 port simulation techniques, and color spaces, among others. Furthermore, the derivations provide a means of verifying that the presented results are consistent. Because the formulas reported in original publications may occasionally contain typos or rely on under-appreciated assumptions, it is not uncommon for such inaccuracies to appear in subsequent material. By providing a step-by-step derivation of the formulas, this book offers the reader the opportunity to verify the correctness of the results for themselves, which can be used with confidence by practitioners in the field.

STRUCTURE
Instead of providing a predetermined syllabus and sets of exercises like a classical textbook would, the content of this handbook is hierarchically organized by field of study with the intent of shedding light on various issues while simultaneously raising and addressing related problems. The non-sequential access of isolated subsets is further supported by systematic cross-references to sectioning units, equations, figures, tables and algorithms (with the corresponding page number appearing in the margin), as well as to bibliographic citations and indexed terms.

While the book’s overall structure follows a logical layout, its design aims at facilitating the navigation through the material in any alternative order. For instance, an instructor may choose to start with a theoretical discussion of the interaction of light with refractive surfaces 647 before introducing image-forming optical systems, or conversely consider the practical implementation of a virtual camera model to be a prerequisite for rendering scenes containing 494 dielectric materials, both approaches being equally sensible.